The A330 can fly safely and land with one side empty!
You can’t dump fuel from only one side unless of course one side is already empty! You would never dump fuel to correct an imbalance anyway. Also not all A330's have fuel dump as the aircraft can be landed if needs must at max take-off weight.
The two situations that have always given me pause for thought have been a major fuel leak or fire over the Atlantic. Not that either of these problems would be any better in a three or four engined aeroplane, so this is not an ETOPS only problem!
From what I understand given the location of the leak, the leak would have stopped had the crew used the leak from engine QRH drill and they could then have used fuel from both wings. However, to be fair to the crew they had no way of knowing where the leak was from and it would have been a brave call to shut the engine down given they had not decided they even had a leak.
The point is had this leak occurred further from land we would now be talking about an accident not an incident.
Last edited by spy; 26th July 2004 at 21:29.