How to: Preliminary Hazard Analysis (Mil-Std-882E)

Preliminary Hazard Analysis

Now we'll talk about Preliminary Hazard Analysis (PHA). This is Task 202 in Military Standard 882E, which is a system safety engineering standard. It's very widely used mostly on military equipment, but it does turn up elsewhere. This standard is of wide interest to people and Task 202 is the second of the analysis tasks. It's one of the first things that you will do on a systems safety program and therefore one of the most informative. This session forms part of a series of lessons that I'm doing on Mil-Std-882E.

Topics for This Session

What are we going to cover in this session? Quite a lot! The purpose of the task, a task description, recording, and scope. How we do risk assessments against Tables 1, 2, and 3. It is severity, likelihood, and the overall risk matrix. We will talk about all three, about risk mitigation and using the order of preference for risk mitigation, a little bit of contracting, and then a short commentary from myself. In fact, I’m providing commentary all the way through. So, let's crack on!

Task 202 Purpose

The purpose of Task 202, as it says, is to perform and document a preliminary hazard analysis, or PHA

for short, to identify hazards, assess the initial risks, and identify potential mitigation measures. We're going to talk about all of that.