But regardless I agree Laning deserves more recognition for his numerous contributions.
Charlie Muntz was certainly deeply involved, as was Don, in ensuring and verifying that failures would be recoverable. I think Muntz coded the interpreter much of the landing was coded in; Laning, the priority-based executive monitor Charlie and Don coded to.
I am always amazed how, given such a slow base machine, it was so conventional to run an interpreter and then write actual programs to the interpreter. Apparently the space needed for the interpreter was more than made up by the more-compact code used to drive it, and the slowdown was tolerable.