The pics had not come up for me due to a link issue it appears. Thanks so much for the repost in #1024.
Awesome.
@Gretchenfrage:
We used to have a disclaimer in the NATOPS manuals when I flew in the Navy, along the lines of "NATOPS is not a suitable substitute for sound judgment." Unfortunately, your assertion of what "land asap" implies is not indicative of sound judgment. Your referring to a different incident which was not identical to this situation is a red herring. Each malfunction, particularly one as novel as the one in this thread, has its own logic and set of choices as the aircraft commander/captain makes decisions regarding safety of flight.
A few points for you to ponder:
A number of witnesses to the event have discussed how they saw members of the flight crew inspect visually what they could of the wing that had undertaken damage. What either of us can safely assume is that the cockpit crew closely examined all of the cockpit indications, and external input they had available to them, as they determined what course of action to take.
The cockpit crew had a variety of input -- what pressures and temps were, what fuel load was, how the aircraft was flying, and a whole host of diagnostics to consider as they applied their sound judgment to their situation.
As we used to teach in the Navy, decision to end a mission and land due to some malfunction breaks down into three sub categories:
Land immediately.
Land as soon as possible
Land as soon as practicable.
The first is applied when each bit of time spent in the air increases the risk of catastrophic failure. See a helicopter with a main transmission beginning to vibrate/grind/come apart for a fine example. After reading the recent UPS thread, I think an aircraft fire (versus an engine fire that does not spread, but is rather put out via established procedures) would probably be classed in a similar mode, particularly when one cannot extinguish/fight the fire.
Land as soon as possible: a bit less dire, but typically applied when a malfunction has significant potential to lead to a land immediately, or to lead to other failures. A significant number of malfunctions will get classed in this way depending upon system that is broken, flight regime, mission, and cargo/passenger load. Example, if you have one malfunction (high engine oil temp) and see secondary indications (engine chips, low engine oil pressure in a single engine aircraft) you get the plane down before it gets worse/lost, and becomes either an emergency or a worse problem.
Land as soon as practicable: in multi-engine aircraft, if you lose one engine you typically have another, or in this case multiple others, that allow you to keep flying. You then assess your situation, and see how much worse it is getting, or may get, as you reconfigure your mission and profile to account for the malfunction. Simply losing an engine might not mean an abort, depending on mission and time, but in this case further damage indicated a return to base. If the aircraft is still flying and the evidence available is that further damage has stopped -- though a few systems are degraded -- there is no requirement to GET IT DOWN NOW if doing so adds another risk (possibly not enough runway) unless you have data that tells the crew that they can expect the situation to degrade further.
With that in mind, it appears that land as soon as practicable was chosen thanks to the sound judgment exercised by the cockpit crew. They diagnosed a multi-system failure and, with the safety of their precious cargo -- passengers -- firmly in mind. They did their best NOT to turn an inflight malfunction into a dire landing emergency. They instead applied airmanship (which includes judgment) to a flying problem, and successfully returned their passengers to terra firma, unharmed.
Your initial assertion assumed a time criticality out of thin air: time is a factor, a variable, in any attempt to deal with a malfunction, or emergency, in flight. Why you have chosen to assign a very small quantity to that variable strikes me as little more than a drama generating device.