Why are many of you so critical of Gretschenfrage's posts? He is not being at all critical of the QF32 crew, but is merely asking a question. Given how severe the damage turned out to be, I can understand that getting down asap could be desirable.
Maybe because "getting down asap" was what they actually did? The aeroplane was getting lighter by the minute and they were holding very close to the airfield, should the need for an *immediate* approach have materialised. If they had attempted to land much earlier, they'd have been odds-on for a significant overrun which could have turned an incident into an major accident, possibly with extensive loss of life. In the end they DID decide to cut short preparations and go for an approach, which shows they were monitoring the situation and made a final decision based on that.
I don't think this is the same class of mishap as the Swissair, as they were faced with an uncontrollable rapid development of smoke and/or fire inside the aircraft. Here there was a set of multiple failures and problems, many subtly interlinked, which required a lot of problem solving and intelligent use of checklists to get to the stage where a safe landing was reasonably assured.
Yes, there are times when you've just got to get the damn thing on the ground but in this circumstance, I'm grateful that cool heads prevailed.