Dispatching with anti-skid u/s is a serious matter which requires much thought before accepting the airplane and thorough briefings.
Agreed, and from my standpoint it gets just that, or did. More than once in my 30+ year career I've dispatched an inop anti-skid into HOU, and as long as one could land on something other than the normal 12R (displaced threshold for landing) and comply the other restrictions, it was a non-issue.
If restrictions could
not be complied with, "careful thought" dictated that I didn't launch the flight and get an aircraft swap, or take other action if it was in the air at the time of the anti-skid failure. I can recall one specific situation where HOU's 04/22 was closed for construction, SE winds were out of tailwind limits for 30L, and with the aircraft now too heavy for 12R, I diverted them to IAH. Another time I had a similar situation with a flight inbound to BUR, and sent him to LAX. After a swap there, the aircraft stayed LAX-OAK (on the long runways of each) for the rest of the day and was fixed overnight.
Whether SWA's internal prohibition on an anti-skid being deferred continues, or is perhaps rescinded (now the NTSB has issued their final report) remains to be seen.
On one hand, if the Company wants to stay conservative despite MMEL permisiveness, that's perfectly fine, and it's certainly their call to make.
On the other hand, should the internal restriction be rescinded, that's fine too, and it can be reasonably be argued that if dispatching an aircraft with an inop anti-skid was supposedly so inherently unsafe then FAA would have already forced Boeing to delete MEL item 32-2 from the MMEL as well as all airline MELs. Ditto for other transport category aircraft.
Just my humble personal opinion here (and nobody else's), but the fact that inop anti-skids have occasionally cropped-up in the last 60 or so years since jet-powered aircraft* like the 707, 727, 737, and DC-9 family, and perhaps other types were deployed and that they have been routinely and safely deferred (and operational restrictions complied with as a part of that MEL deferral process), that suggests to me that there's no real
systemic issue involved here, only an issue associated with a
specific flight.
I'll live with whichever way it ends up going. Like I said, anti-skids don't fail all that often, and when one does, we'll deal with it, just like we deal with any other out-of-service event.
(*The recip and turbo prop aircraft of the 1950s and early may well have also had anti-skid systems, but that was before my time)