Originally Posted by
rottenray
ACARS.
Most pilots today have absolutely NO incentive to continue a flight which could reflect badly on his or her record. Most airlines have absolutely NO incentive to endanger their passengers.
The A380 "knows" more about its engines, etc., through sensors and monitors than you probably knew about your children attending school.
It's nice to see the uproar, but this is really a non-issue - except for bored aficionados who desperately need something to talk about, something which lets them show how much they know about the industry and how much lore they can pull up.
I agree on the telemetry and that the engine manufacturers can often run remote diagnostics on the aircraft.
However, the 'all knowning' A-380 systems in this case did not say
'Excuse me captain but the duplicated for resilience fuel pumps in number 4 are going to fail in 30 minutes" Nor did they telemeter a warning to the IAE. The fuel pumps failed both of them- and the crew got the message that the engine had failed at the same time as IAE engineers.
Now when two
separate, redundant, items fail at the same time that should raise flags that all is not good. There could be a common mode failure - perhaps line engineer 'Murphy' on DI's carefully did something which screwed each of the fuel pumps (or associated equipment) on number 4, and he had happily repeated the exercise on the other three engines.
While I agree that 4 engine aircraft are specifically designed to allow safe three engine operations, this may be more to cope with events such as birdstrike or a single point of failure such as an oil leak. Concurrent failures of redundant systems as in this case, are different animals and should be treated with a lot more caution.