58 ECAMs? Holy cr@p, thank god I left AB! Talking about design flaws RR does not seem to be alone.
If a donkey explodes, you lost it. If it's uncontained and bruises your wing, you need to get your butt down as fast as possible. Who guarantees that you will not lose more than just the leash of No1? I personally would not bother about dumping too much fuel and even less about the 58 ECAM alerts. I would want us down on mother earth as fast as possible.
We'll have to wait for the various more infomed inquiries to get an accurate assessment... but my instinct is to disagree with you.
I have no idea of your background / experience, but in my view you miss a main point about emergency handling - "stable" and "unstable". We have a Pax account the "hole was getting bigger".. but most of the photos do not show a dramatic change in size. Might I suggest:
- Skin is "stressed", but I would think it would take a significant hole to cause a <MTOW jet at 1g to lose a wing i.e. suffer a structural failure.
- Skins etc. are designed to cope with small failures, and have tear stops / limits / paths.
i.e. a wild guess, but I reckon the wing/skin damage in terms of the structural integrity of the aircraft was insignificant.
58 ECAMs to deal with - quite likely given the wiring damage. What's wrong with that? They are prioritised, and there is no obligation on the crew to deal with all of them prior landing. We have another thread (A320 AoA / stall / crash) where people are bleating for more failure messages.
We have another post saying they used almost the entire runway length - if they did, and using all stopping devices to the max, then I might suggest <<
I would want us down on mother earth as fast as possible>> could have seen an overrun?
I think we are going to see some good redundancy design (not unique to AB) that took some wing / wiring / hyd damage, yet was left with sufficient systems to fly, approach and land and stop.
I will be interested to know if there where any areas where 1 more failure e.g. further Hyd system would have left them in a very serious / terminal situation. #1 Engine for instance - having lost #2, if #1 was stuck at Climb Pwr, or idle, then I would think urgency might have been further up the priority list. OTOH, maybe #1 was working fine until the moment came to shut it down, when it wouldn't. Or maybe, who knows, 1 of the 58 messages effectively indicated to them the Eng would work fine, but couldn't be shut down, and they could plan around that.
Just my 2ps worth - summary, I suspect (and hope) the crew will come out looking very good, the A380 a robust design... and after the initial failure, this was a fairly "stable" situation, and no rush. As for the Trent and the IP problems, bit of a shame they were foreseen, but not stopped.
NoD