Another non event that prompts a boat load of uninformed comments from many here who have never qualified to fly anything with more than one or two engines, and probably not even jet ones!
Non-event? Uninformed? I guess the Canadian TSB feels the same way!
How could the crew (and engineering) have known at the time of failure that there wasn't more to it than a simple engine failure? How do we know that a fuel pump
wouldn't leak before we start our trans-Atlantic crossing? Small fuel leak, increasingly becoming bigger could have changed the whole scenario. Pushing one's luck doesn't make it safe.
With passengers in the back I believe the convenience of service facilities and whether you have to buy room nights should not be the issue. The only issue should be "Which airport is the safest option at this point."
There have been a number of successfully continued flights in the last few years but I am wondering what the inspector would say in the case of a further shutdown and crash when the aircraft has flown past a safe landing point and further, what the flying public would think of the airline.
But then I prefer safety to convenience. Once we do something marginal we get used to it and sooner or later it becomes 'standard practice.' Just personally I think adjusted power take offs for noise reduction and 'saving the engines' are madness and the idea that we should fly an aircraft with three hundred passengers on it five thousand miles with a major systems failure, (and a quarter of your engine power lost is a major failure,) as an alternative to a safe landing that is immediately available is madness too. Just because the aviation community has got used to the idea doesn't make it sensible.
Sooner or later this will go wrong and then we'll have a major reset.
Well said! Your risk assessment is limited when airborne. You can only rely on your current computed indications which may not prove reliable depending on the failure (see HL-3378 and EK-132).