> as lemmas

1948 Jrnl. Royal Aeronaut. Soc. 52 198/1 Automatic power plant control including automatic ‘fail safe’ provision against mechanical trouble or power failure.

1949 Jrnl. Royal Aeronaut. Soc. 53 179/1 What was really required was a propeller and c.s.u. combination which would fail safe.

1958 ‘P. Bryant’ Two Hours to Doom 15 The Failsafe procedure, the system SAC had dreamed up to prevent any accidental attack sparking off a third world war.

1958 Times 20 Aug. 9/7 It is becoming accepted practice that they [sc. jet aircraft] must ‘fail safe’.

1958 Listener 16 Oct. 593/1 Designers [of aircraft] learnt how to design against fatigue, and the ‘fail-safe’ form of design was developed.

1959 New Statesman 790/3 Just as atomic bombers have a technical fail-safe device which recalls them from a mission if anything goes wrong, so it is inevitable that every country will have to devise its own political fail-safe policy, designed to insulate itself from the dangers due to other countries' actions.

1962 F. I. Ordway et al. Basic Astronautics vii. 317 The component..is as fail-safe as the one tested.

1962 Want to run a Railway? 16 The system is designed throughout on ‘fail-safe’ principles—if any part of it is not working properly then signals automatically go to danger.

1971 Daily Tel. 8 Jan. (Colour Suppl.) 15/4 Because of the possibility of human error and total reliance on communications between pilots and controller the system will ‘fail-dangerous’ rather than ‘fail-safe’.