Author is given credit at the bottom of the article. This should help some you out that think it's easy to point fingers. Let the full report come out. I, for one, have seen snow in a DC-9 a few years ago that I thought was going to make us a statistic. They said the runway had been groomed -- yeah about two hours before our arrival! Now back to the subject:

NTSB: SWA overrun caused by pilot error, use of poor data

Thursday October 4, 2007
US National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the probable cause of the Southwest Airlines 737-700 runway overrun in December 2005 at Chicago Midway "was the pilots' failure to use available reverse thrust in a timely manner" and to use the best data to calculate landing distance.
The aircraft veered from the runway after landing and crashed through a boundary fence onto a road next to the airport, striking a car and killing a six-year-old child.
NTSB said late Tuesday that the pilots' lack of familiarity with the -700's autobrake system "distracted them from thrust reverser usage during the challenging landing." Also contributing to the crash was a failure to use the best information to calculate landing distance, the board said. "As we approach the winter months we continue to push for acceptance of a minimum safety margin so that this type of accident does not occur again," NTSB Chairman Mark Rosenker said.
The investigation revealed that as the flight neared Midway, the pilots "received mixed braking action reports for the landing runway. The flight crew used an onboard laptop performance computer provided in the cockpit of SWA's airplanes to calculate expected landing distance. They entered multiple scenarios including wind speed and direction, airplane gross weight at touchdown and reported runway braking action." Based on their calculations, they decided they could land safely.
However, NTSB stated, "the accident pilots were not aware that stopping margins displayed by the OPC for poor runway conditions were in some cases based on a lower tailwind component than that which was presented. Also, the accident pilots were not aware that the stopping margins computed by the SWA OPC incorporated the use of thrust reversers for their model aircraft, the 737-700, which resulted in more favorable stopping margins." If they had been aware of these factors, they "might have elected to divert to another airport."
In the aftermath of the accident, NTSB in January 2006 issued an urgent safety recommendation to FAA "to prohibit airlines from using credit for the use of thrust reversers when calculating stopping distances" (ATWOnline, Dec. 8, 2006). In this week's report, the board issued a new urgent safety recommendation that calls on FAA "to immediately require operators to conduct arrival landing distance assessments before every landing based on existing performance data, actual conditions and incorporating a minimum safety margin of 15%."

by Aaron Karp