Moggie,
Just a question, interested how you would view these actions.
1. You have an engine fire just after V1 on a nice VMC day at LHR. Get airborne and run the ECAM / EICAS drill and the fire is extinguished. You are overweight so you take the time to take radar vectors around for an ILS whilst running the overweight landing checklist, chatting to the crew and pax. Once you are happy the box is programmed you turn in and land.
2. Same problem but fire 2 bottles and the fire light remains on. You turn visually downwind left hand, call 'Attention Crew at Stations', stick the wheels and flaps out and land.
Nothing wrong from my point of view of using a bit of time, if it is available, to make a decision.
As far as throwing it on the ground immediately!
Lets say you had an in-flight engine fire which extinguished at the first bottle and you had a choice of a poor weather approach into an airfield with horrendous approach climb gradient problems, no radar, a short runway and shocking ATC. (But still technically a 'suitable airport'.
Or, you could get the aircraft on the ground 5-10 minutes later at an airport with the same weather, no big rocks to fly into, a radar, 4000m and a mate that isn't lying to you on the radio.
Surely, irrespective of what is written in the checklist, the pilot has to make a judgement based upon his own unique circumstances.
A couple of minutes spent ensuring that the action he or she is about to take pays dividends in a lot of circumstances. For every Swiss Air incident, there are numerous others where crews jump in, rush decisions and make a bad situation worse.
As LIAJ says this is the PPrumourNE after all. Are we sure that they just couldn't find out whether or not Chennai would be open to them. So whilst sorting the problem they got Ops to square away the folks on the ground rather than getting further away from an airfield that was the best available (if open) and they hoped they would be able to get clearance to land at.
I don't know about you but I can't even make some of the controllers in that part of the world realise what my callsign is. Trying to communicate anything beyond your estimate for the next reporting point can result in total silence and zero help from the ground. Its not quite like London or Maastrict.
Glad everyone was ok
Ghost
