It was so "bang on accurate," including your description of how the flight crew was making all possible speed back to LHR in their hysteria, that somebody who was actually a pilot had to point out that outbound, they were flying into a strong headwind and when they reversed course, guess what happened? (I'll leave you to puzzle that out.)
Another example to us of the accuracy of "witness" statements. Ever a challenge in the accident investigation field.
The observation are of what the witness experienced or thought they saw, interpreted in their narrow field of experienced to be later intrepreted by those experts with specialized knowledge and experience.
It's up to us, the reader to interpret through those few experts that do have the benefit of specialized knowledge and experience appropriate to the subject.
Sometime we depend on the media to search out and find the more appropriate interpretation, while all too often we subcomb to being lazy and allowing the media to just print the words that sell to their readership.
If the media is so dumb that they can't bother themselves to search for the realities than to simply quote an unvetted PPrune source than we have only to blame the news writer and not the witness.