Spot-on Emratty
Most of the blogs appears to be from people stuck on 2 engine mentality. Yes on a 2 engined, you look for the nearest safe runway to put down the bird. There will be hardly any other considerations.
But on a four engined plane you have lost only 25% when one engine goes to sleep. As a technical person I have dealt with similar situations several times. I remember when my company flew an aircraft for over 5 hours on 3 engines, without a hitch. That was a B747 classic. I can quote several such instances on B747 with various airlines.
Those days none of the modern instrumentation or data down link existed. You go by what you experienced in the cockpit and what you saw on your instruments before and during the event. The decision is made by the pilots to continue or not. Rarely they contacted Maintrol for advice for those critical decisions, because we were blind on the ground with out the data dump those days.
But now things are different, fortunately. Moment the engine shuts down, there is a huge data dump to the maintrol and to the engine manufacturer, RR or EA or GE. The events that follow are as below.
If it is a complex issue, a conference call to the engine manufacturer is made to analyse the event. The concurrence on what has gone wrong is very swift. By that time the Captain will be on a SAT call to give us a run down as to what he saw or experienced. The technical team then advise the crew what their conclusion is, and whether to continue or turn around. The captain normally concur, though their decision is final and rarely questioned later.
Never a thought goes in our mind about the $ involved for diversion etc, during the decision process. It is always about safety first. The huge data that is received these days helps to take a safe and very correct decision. So please do not speculate that decisions are based on how many thousand $ saved etc. That is far from reality. If some one quotes a figure of the thousands saved, it is just an after thought, or a good press story.
Of course if the same engine failure on this A380 had taken place with a bang and fire warning etc, I am sure crew would have taken a U turn immediately, without even bothering to call any body. The Kuwait stop was probably as they consumed too much fuel at low altitude. Otherwise the flight would have made it to the destination and few would have known about it.