[ldarby]

> If the automatically loaded data strikes either pilot as not right, they can make a manual request for takeoff data from the airline operations center. “But 99.8% of the time, the data is accurate,” he said.

> Alaska’s Peyton said “several crews noticed the error and notified dispatch.”

> The pilot at American Airlines said “requesting manual data is not standard” and that if there’s a glitch, naturally some pilot somewhere is going to miss it.

> “Not everyone gets eight hours sleep the night before. Someone is going through a divorce. Someone is not so sharp that morning,” he said. “The sanity check isn’t perfect every day of the week.”

So they already knew (or should have known) about this glitch, and did nothing about it until it started causing damage to aircraft. I would have thought the pilots who reported it earlier would have also predicted the outcome and got it fixed then. From my lay perspective, it's obvious that if aircraft is heavier than the flight computer was told it is, then something bad is going to happen (e.g. could have been complete failure to take off and crash at the end of the runway).

Well, maybe such incidents where pilots do make the prediction, and get it fixed before it causes the problem they predicted, never make it to the news...