ONBASS will introduce the Principle of Active System Safety (PASS) for General Aviation in Europe. The scientific and technological objectives of the project can be summarised as follows:

• Further theoretical and conceptual development of the active safety principle and formation of theoretical models to analyse the limits of the principle's applicability.
• Research and development of basic fault tolerant hardware elements for the on-board part of the active safety system.
• Concepts, design and development of a resilient system software core for the active safety system.
• Investigation, analysis and definition of the financial and business aspects associated with the PASS concept in the long-term.

The development of the essential theoretical foundation and the required technologies to realise ONBASS, initially for General Aviation and later on for Commercial Aviation as well, represents a huge challenge. A substantial part of this challenge is to be addressed by the ONBASS project.

The main technological achievements and impact that the ONBASS project is expected to bring about are:

• The formation of new models of flight safety including the definition of the roles of information and data structure.
• Novel additions to reliability theory which make possible a scheme for improving real-time flight safety.
• The development of an aircraft active safety system.
• The development of ultra-high availability hardware for active safety systems including fault tolerant structures RAM, ROM, FLASH, CPU, Bus.
• System software fundamentals for safety critical applications, including in-flight management of hardware faults without affecting the application state
• Research into specification formalisms and development tools for safety-critical systems.