Originally Posted by
Ollie Onion
I was chatting to an Airbus Safety investigator about this incident a few months after and he said that Airbus were a bit dismayed as to why it took so long to get the aircraft back on the ground as there were no longer runways available for them to return to but a lot of time was wasted trying to find the perfect mix of entries to the performance software to generate a result that showed they could land when in reality the fiddling with the numbers didn’t change the reality of the situation just meant lots more time spent in the air with a LAND ASAP. He also said that the crew hadn’t done anything extra special and that any average A380 crew could have recovered the aircraft safely, I got the feeling this was a bit of a dig at the QF32 Captain who was on a bit of a book tour at the time spreading the story that he pretty much single handily recovered the crippled aircraft against all odds.
To pick up on this, it is my understanding that the key problem they were exacerbating as they kept the plane in the air was that the lateral weight discrepancy (due to fuel not being consumed evenly on each side and crossfeed impossible) was increasing. I would be interested to know what the crew considered as their "Plan B" if they couldn't make the computer find a performance setting that they could stop within the longest runway's available distance. Were they just going to fly the plane until it rolled over? This seems ridiculous relative to a low-energy overrun.