There is a lot of mis-information being given here on the XV109 incident in November 1988. To the best of my knowledge none of the people making comments were a part of the crew - I was. As the pilot sitting in the right hand seat of that aeroplane on that night I can tell you that most of what you read on this thread about that night is factually incorrect.
For example, there was no tyre damage evident at Gardermoen.
The Captain and FE chose NOT to infom the rest of the crew about the full story at Leuchars - after they had bullied the unfortunate GE into declaring it "fit for one flight". We were told by the Captain that the GE was "perfectly happy" - a straight lie, as we found out later.
There was no hydraulic failure as such - just the fact that the no1 and no2 engines were starved of fuel and both flamed out, thereby indirectly causing a loss of 1 hydraulic system.
No debris went down the port engines - they quit because they had no fuel!
The FE did NOT pump fuel from the right hand side to the left or from the no2 tank into the no1. The facts are that the fuel lines were so badly damaged that he/we had no control of the fuel system and all the fuel from the left hand side was lost through the damaged lines. The fuel in the right hand side was unaffected and all 15,000lb was available to run the no3 and no4 engines ( we "just" lost all 15,000lb of the fuel from the left because we had no way of stopping it running right out of the severed fuel lines.
There is no doubt that we as a crew made some mistakes on the pre-flight decision making (some of that because some of us were deliberately excluded from the decision making process). However, whilst we may have ****ed it up on the ground, we actually did a bloody good job of getting a badly broken aeroplane back on the ground. The double asymmetric approach was performed "by the book" - I believe it was the only time that an RAF VC10 did one for real and was a testament to the training we received from the OCU and Sqn training crews. I think BOAC had one double engine failure though.
The inquiry pinned the blame fairly, squarely and accurately on the shoulders of the Captain and FE. Myself, the Nav and the GE were given bollockings for not standing up to the two arseholes who misled us - a lesson that has stayed with me for the remainder of my career.
My other post on this matter can be found here:
http://www.pprune.org/military-aircr...9-today-2.html