Accident Review: Southwest Airlines 1248 Runway Surface Condition Reporting

In my day job, I've been working on Australian standards for implementing the Global Reporting Format (GRF). Unfortunately, as with many advances in aviation, this was a change brought about by an accident. While it was likely that there were many influential accidents and incidents, I want to analyse the critical inciting event in this post. 

Southwest Airlines Flight (SWA) 1248 was miraculous in that everyone on the aircraft survived. But it was also tragic with the death of a child not even at the airport. And it triggered a lot of action by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the International Civil Aviation Organisation, and many other civil aviation authorities.