Gem writes:
I also am somewhat uneasy that there is speculation on who will be reaching for the Lawyers. Some of that speculation is coming from a somewhat litigious society (more so than Australia and Europe)...
Gem, it's not the US folks who started this legal discussion. Australian rags have already run headlines announcing that Qantas intends to recover costs from Rolls. The links are somewhere a page or so back.
Quick question...
Rolls intends to pull new engines back from Airbus, and use them as temporary subs for engines already in service while those engines are being upgraded or fixed.
Once those sub engines have done their duty, are they going back to be sold as new?
Bearfoil writes:
This flight came within a hair of being lost at Sea.
and he's pretty much correct.
Had the damage to control wiring gone the other way - leaving #1 uncontrollable except for the choice of shutting it down - things might have been much worse.
If the wing had been damaged differently, compromising its strength, things would have been much worse.
This wasn't an "average" flight at all - the PIC was doing a check ride, so you can assume he was at the top of his game. You could also assume that the pilot evaluating him was well rested and very attentive.
Granted, A380 captains are generally A380 captains because they have exhibited the best performance.
But there was a lot of skill in the cockpit when this happened, and it didn't start out as "just another sector" for anyone involved, even before the engine spit a disc.
Had that not been the case, things might have worked out differently.
One can't really say it *would* have been a tragedy, but it's fair to assume that at least one of the major reasons it wasn't a tragedy is because it wasn't a normal sector and that a lot of Qantas' best and brightest happened to be in the pointy end at the moment.
Cheers!