So Joshua Woods, driving in his parents car, was killed by a rogue Boeing 737 landing at an airport. The on board Boeing computer calculated that an approach and landing could be easily conducted when the crew input the available data that they had access to.
As a mere by-stander, this is shocking! To potential Boeing passengers this must be awful, to read that on board computers, after years of use, are NOT fail safe?
Executive summary: the thrust reversers did not deploy properly, causing the plane to overshoot the end of the runway.
A point of contention right after the accident was that the pilots had apparently activated the automatic brake system in violation of Southwest policy, but the NTSB concluded the crucial factor was the unanticipated
18-second delay in the thrust-reversers deploying. As a result, NTSB is urging the FAA to to prohibit allowing for thrust-reversers in onboard stopping-distance calculations. (Before landing, the crew had used the onboard computer to calculate stopping distance for "wet-poor" conditions; those calculations assumed the thrust reversers would deploy normally.)
The risks here appear to be two of the most common ones: trusting an automatic system to activate within specification 100% of the time, and allowing that trusted system to be the critical margin between success and catastrophic failure -- even in the successful-landing scenario represented by the onboard computer's figures, the plane was anticipated to stop within
30 feet of the end of the runway after a rollout of over 4000 feet, a margin of error of less than 1%.
FACT or FICTION?