What aircraft did CASA use for the Performance ..
I can vaguely picture the Seagull manual in the mind's eye. This, as I recall, came in sometime after I withdrew from active pilot training work. Can't recall at all what Type it was based on, though.
Talking back in the 70s/early 80s, there was NO ATPL performance .. which always surprised me somewhat.
ATPL/SCPL exams included Flight Planning (which was an interesting subject) but no specific performance or weight control work.
As an aside, given that most folk have never heard of SCPL ... in the earlier days of the two airline policy, some shonky practices arose to make it harder for Oz pilots to head off O/S. One of these was the Senior Commercial Pilot Licence (SCPL) which gave similar priviliges to the ATPL but applied to non-airline heavy aircraft operations. Another was the 2nd Class ATPL for F/Os .. needless to say, both were local Oz animals and totally not understood O/S. Even during the 89 nonsense, F/Os who went O/S initially had trouble with their 2nd Class ATPLs.
Given the comparatively simplistic required CPL level of understanding, the end result was that folk moved onto heavy aircraft near totally reliant on operator endorsement courses to make up the shortfall. QF (Wal S et al), AN (John W et al) and TN (Peter T et al) ops engineering ran reasonably detailed training modules .. and the training notes were pretty good/detailed. Wal's pilot notes (Aerodynamics and Performance of the Jet Transport - QF Aero Eng Report 3001) are still sought after by the flying fraternity as a basic engineering text suitable for pilot study.
For the minor heavy operators ... John H looked after IPEC's Argosy/DC9 training and ops engineering ... can't speak to EW in any detail but, on the basis of how they approached their line operations engineering work, I suspect they were not in the same playing field as the other airline operators. Initially, Newton H provided reasonable external consultancy support and, subsequently, Bob P moved into the role after he did his Master's at Sydney. Ron S and Jim D (ex-DCA performance engineer-pilots) may have done some work as well but I think AN had taken over the ops eng support by the time they would have been in a position to have done much for EW.
Getting back to the original question, there are two reasonable considerations -
(a) wet/contaminated runways associated with wx causing Cat 1 - covered by other factors so probably not pertinent
(b) misjudged flare/float/touchdown causing a longer than presumed landing roll. Given the quite reasonable minima for Cat 1, this really is a furphy.
Probably a case that one of the CASA (or precedent organisation) examiners just thought it was a good idea ? The regulator has always been a good source of "good" ideas rather than rigorous deduction.
PFM ?
The only PFM activities on the 727 were with regard to generator parallelling ... and, in any case, who needs a PFM box if you have a real live F/E ? ...
... now the A320 .. that's in a different paddock altogether ...