Today, articles appeared about the Southwest accident at Chicago's
Midway Airport which were confusing. Let's clear the confusion up.
The pilots should not have landed and should have known better.

They rationalized their way into thinking something they wanted to do
(to land) would work. They had a desired answer, and selected and
manipulated available information to get that answer rather than the
right answer. Sounds a lot like politics, doesn't it?

Flights are planned by a licensed dispatcher. In planning a flight, the
dispatcher must check everything to make sure the flight can be con-
ducted safely. The captain checks the dispatcher's work and either
confirms it or contacts the dispatcher if there seems to be a need for
changes. Ultimately, both must agree on what it takes to insure the
flight's safety.

One of the things the dispatcher checks is the ability of the plane to
stop on the runway at the destination, considering winds, weather,
and runway condition. The dispatcher is NOT allowed to consider
reverse thrust; reverse thrust doesn't always work. So calculations
must prove the plane can land and stop safely without use of the
reversers.

Once plane has taken off, any pilot with good judgement will err in
the direction of safety and not simply get legalistic when landing, as
the crew of the Southwest 737 did. It was obvious that landing at
Midway with a high tailwind on a short and slippery runway was out
of the question. But to try to support the idea that a landing could be
made in a big tailwind on a slippery runway, the pilots turned to
data in their laptop.

The data was provided by Boeing based on test flights with a brand
new airplane in top condition and flown by test pilots. It is not perfor-
mance which can reliably be duplicated with an average airplane
with average pilots . . . if ever. It is like reading in a sports car maga-
zine that says a certain car will go zero to 60 in 5.4 seconds. Maybe
so when brand new, perfectly tuned, and in the hands of a talented
test driver who gets to try it a dozen times. Then they publish the
test driver's best time as what the car is capable of. Well, yet it is,
but the average Joe will never match those numbers.

There is another reason the 737 pilots should have known better.
When you need reverse thrust and try to get it too quickly, it locks up
and won't let you. This isn't easy to explain to a non-airline pilot, but
after landing, you have to let the engines completely spin down to
idle in forward thrust before trying to get the engines to go into reverse
thrust. This is as it should be, for it is intended to prevent the plane
from going into reverse thrust inadvertently.If you hurry the process,
the reverse thrust selection system locks up, and stays in forward thrust.

It appears that's what happened to this crew. The captain - knowing
this was a marginal situation at best - rushed to get into reverse thrust
too early and locked up the reverse thrust selection system. So he
abandoned trying to get reverse thrust and concentrated on using
the wheel brakes. The copilot grabbed the throttles and they went
right into reverse thrust, just as they would have if the captain had
not rushed.

But the copilot's success with reverse thrust came to too late to get
the plane stopped without running out of runway. It is even question-
able whether the plane could have stopped even if they had done
everything perfectly. The numbers in the laptop computer reflect test
performance - not real world performance.

In addition, the news reports incorrectly state there was a small
tailwind. It was NOT a small tailwind. It was a tailwind greater than
any I ever landed in during my entire career as an airline pilot.

The National Transportation Safety Board got it right, saying pilots
should never assume the successful use of their thrust reversers.
I'm glad they stated that. But, of course, real pilots already knew that.

Yet, the Southwest pilots' union - in a statement which I read as trying
to cover their ass - claimed to include the thrust reversers is "a safe
and wise decision". Then they backtracked to advise their members
to give themselves a greater margin of safety. That's just double-talk.
No wise pilot worthy of the term predicates a landing on the use of
reverse thrust.

The National Transportation Safety Board said it perfectly: when
predicating being able to stop on having everything go your way
perfectly, "a single event, the delayed deployment of the thrust
reversers, can lead to an unsafe condition, as it did in this accident."