The Fault Tree Analysis, or “FTA”, is a top-down, analysis of failure propagation. It employs a deductive analysis of the failures to determine which combination of lower-level, or “primary” failures can combine to cause a “critical event” or an “undesired state” of the fielded system. It is used particularly for safety and risk assessment for air-worthiness certification and in other safety-critical systems, products or industries. In design development, the FTA analysis serves as an instrument to provide feedback of areas in the design that need to be improved during design development, whether, for example, to add design redundancy or improve component/subsystem reliability.