fail safe

fail safe: 1. Of a device, the capability to fail without detriment to other devices or danger to personnel. (188) 2. Pertaining to the automatic protection of programs and/or processing systems to maintain safety when a hardware or software failure is detected in a system. [NIS] 3. Pertaining to the structuring of a system such that either it cannot fail to accomplish its assigned mission regardless of environmental factors or that the probability of such failure is extremely low.

This HTML version of FS-1037C was last generated on Fri Aug 23 00:22:38 MDT 1996