scope:

Description of Driving Event:

In order to mitigate the risk associated with flying a high-performance technology demonstrator, the Project chose to build two aircraft (a primary and a backup) and operate them remotely. While this approach reduced the risk to an acceptable level with respect to the Project's established risk threshold, upper management and other stakeholders remained uncomfortable. Thus, the Project's risk management approach had not been communicated to all stakeholders in sufficient detail, especially with respect to one of its most significant risk. Therefore, a decision was made to add a parachute recovery system to the aircraft that could operate autonomously or remotely in case standard flight controls were lost. Unfortunately, the decision to incorporate the parachute recovery system was made after the aircraft design was baselined and had to be "reverse engineered" to fit into a bay on the aircraft. This resulted in an increase in size, weight, and development time of the aircraft.