Both practitioners and scholars with an interest in Resilience Engineering have expressed the need for model- or process-based methods for the assessment of resilience. This paper explores the potential of the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM; Hollnagel, 2004) to address five key resilience characteristics (buffering capacity, flexibility, margin, tolerance, and cross-scale interactions, as identified by Woods, 2006). Application of FRAM to the Alaska Airlines flight 261 accident and application and evaluation of these resilience characteristics to the functional model shows that FRAM to some extent allows for resilience assessment through these characteristics. Moreover, FRAM-based assessment of resilience challenges the description and definition of these characteristics and enables to ask some specific questions that further develop their assessment.