Really calm and professional all round. Crew were not rushed and kept everone informed. ATC supported as required.
Yep, nice job.
The loss of a single hydraulic amongst 3 systems is not an emergency!
About the only thing I would have done differently
is to declare an emergency.
The recent thinking, under U.S. regs anyway, is that it gives you
carte blanche with whatever decisions you make as PIC. And it's CYA for stuff like landing back at JFK without getting re-dispatched.
Of course, if you have time and remember, you get on the sat phone and have a big group think with all the geniuses on the ground back at headquarters (kinda like PPRuNe, come to think of it
). But, if they give advice that is later found to be wrong and you believed it, it was your fault because you trusted them. I had a colleague on the sat phone with maintenance pop and reset a circuit breaker in flight that fixed a problem only to find out afterward that the feds were hopping mad because the procedure was not listed in the AOM.
Reports that it was a single hydraulic system failure yet reported that it landed sans flaps extended
Not a professional but thought it would need to be dual system failure for that to occur?
I'm thinking one possibility is that they perhaps took off with either 5 or 15 degrees of flaps and got a trailing edge flap asymmetry indication when the flaps were retracted after takeoff accompanied by the indication of loss of left system hydraulic pressure (TE FLAP ASYM and L HYD SYS PRESS). The asymmetry would prevent alternate flap extension on the trailing edge flaps (or leading edge slats if they had LE SLAT ASYM).
In years past I've seen it debated here and elsewhere but loss of a major hydraulic system prior to a crossing almost always means you are turning back in an ETOPS plane in my opinion.
The old argument would have been that you don't really need the left hydraulic system on the 757 until you land and then you're going to have to use alternate systems to lower the gear and flaps anyway so you might as well do it on the other side of the pond.
But, you usually don't know what other systems, if any, were damaged by the event that caused the loss of hydraulics so not making the crossing is a very wise move in my view.
In this Aer Lingus case, I suspect some flaps were still extended and locked from moving by an asymmetry so the no-go decision was a done deal.