I'm not in any way pointing the finger at all, but yet again we see reports of fuel dumping in this instance. Did not Swisair 111 God Bless them all, do the same thing & unfortunately possibly let that become the major issue at the expence of a very speedy landing?
You are right in saying that fuel dumping shouldn't be used as a delaying action in case of an inflight emergency.
However, it might never be wrong to start dumping immediatly while heading back on a straight line. There is no need to go into a holding for losing some fuel. In fact, we haven't heard that this crew did.
It also might be worth a thought to go below the max landing weight as soon as you get trustful information from the cabin that the smoke or fire is out. In this case, you could avoid the overweight landing inspection, the hot brakes, the burst tires aso. It looks like they did a very short ground time for the second try, so they maybe did it this way.
btw was it the same crew that departed again? How about duty times?
Dani