"However, here is the real question, would they have made it on a 180 minute flight plan at the ETP with minimum fuel required? Which ever way you look at this incident they were very lucky! A very nasty position to find yourself in over the Atlantic."
This was what interested me - and making several assumptions as a non-ATPL - that they would have needed to dump fuel relatively quickly in any case to correct the imbalance (guessing that allowing a severe fuel imbalance to develop could be unrecoverable because fuel would only dump from the tanks at a maximum rate).
So, given early diagnosis, would they have had fuel enough to make any runway with power. And what does that say about ETOPS.