Phileas,
Sure, I've produced many 'max fuel' computerised flight plans in my career but the systems I worked with only took into consideration aircraft performance and not airfield performance.
The system I worked with had an option "economical fuelling" which would give the PIC the information on
what the fuel prices were at which port of call,
how much fuel it was economical to carry,
how much the gain would be at intermediate figures
e.t.c.
It's all very well for an Ops guy to produce such a flight plan but I doubt airfield conditions were taken into consideration, not just the modest runway length but was it contaminated, what was the surface wind, what flap settings were the crew to use etc.
Any ops guy worth his money and in a company with SOP's worth considering would definitly look into that even before starting calculations. What we would do first would be to go into the IRT's and find out the RTOW we would have to calculate with in the first place bases on TAF and actual conditions. We would then use that as a base for the above calculations. Naturally, the precalculated values were conservative in our company, but the crew would have a good idea on what to plan with.
Being based at an airport which has notorious political problems with tailwind take offs being the rule rather the exeption, we definitly were checking and rechecking these values over and over again until doors closed. Of course we'd do the same for the outstations.
I've been out of profession for 3 years now, but I had a look at some 747-200 IRT's yesterday and a 2700m runway at SL and with 0 wind in the calculation (yes, I know there was some headwind) looks rather short for an intercontinental flight in the best of conditions. Of course the accident plane might have been totally different from the one I looked at, but if I calculate a ZFW of around 260 tons on a 6-7 hour trip, I think with minimum fuel it would push 350 tons. That is a lot of weight to carry out of a 2700 m runway, at least for the -200 series I looked at.
Best regards
AN2 Driver