Full Name
Steven Beland
Job Title
System Architecture, Certification & Safety Advisor
Office
Methodical Safety
Speaker Bio
Steve Beland has over 36 years of experience with the development, safety assessment and certification of flight-critical complex systems. He has expertise in aircraft and system safety assessments, development assurance, and using these methods to shape successful system architectures to meet safety objectives. He recently retired as a Technical Fellow in Boeing’s new Enterprise Safety & Mission Assurance organization and beforehand was an Associate Technical Fellow in the Flight Controls organization of Boeing Commercial Airplanes leading safety assessments and influencing the architecture of the 777 and 787 fly-by-wire systems and the airplane-wide development assurance effort for the 787. He’s performed safety assessments for the flight controls on the 737, 747, 757, 767, 777, 777-X and 787 Dreamliner models, and consulted on safety and certification aspects of other development projects. He has been a delegate of the FAA or the Boeing ODA as a Designated Engineering Representative (DER) or Engineering-Unit Member for 30 years.

Steve has made significant contributions to the predominate industry development assurance and safety assessment guidelines for civil aircraft and systems in SAE ARP4754A & B and SAE ARP4761A and for complex electronics in RTCA DO-254. As a long-time member of the SAE S-18 Committee he co-led the concept and writing of guidelines for the assignment of Development Assurance Levels (DALs), the new Preliminary Aircraft Safety Assessment (PASA) and Aircraft Safety Assessment (ASA) concepts and guidelines and their interactions with other processes for the new ARP4761A; Steve was awarded the James M. Crawford Technical Standards Outstanding Achievement Award in 2016 for this work in S-18. He has served as a co-chair of SAE S-18A assessing the application of these ARPs to UAVs & Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) systems and as a co-chair of the systems and safety assessment subgroup in SAE G-34, “Artificial Intelligence for Aviation.” He is now teaching courses on the new AP4754B and ARP4761A for SAE International.

Steve has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Tech, an MS in Systems Engineering from the University of Missouri – Rolla, and a Graduate Certificate in Architecture & Systems Engineering Modelling from MIT.
Steven Beland