Airbubs, with considerable respect and creaping the thread a bit, you would REALLY declare an emergency because you didn't fancy crossing the pond on two out of three hydraulic systems ? Gosh ! May I suggest that rather than asking the Senior Cabin Attendant " Drills complete........What's for Dinner, Luv?" you might , at least, return, hold, burn off fuel to a lower landing weight, and for CRM pundits, call company, call Mum, call wifey or ex Girl-friend, have a team meeting with the crew in the forward galley, check with junior CA if she agrees with the team decision.....................er, and then, Blimey, land.
I think you're starting to understand the mindset of this here new fangled CRM stuff. In fact, it's called something else these days, I can't rightly remember.
And a lot of these 'new' ways of thinking in the U.S. do seem to filter down over the pond after a while to other countries. Like CVR's (I know, invented by an Ozmate), locked cockpit doors, CRM, random drug and alcohol tests, FA on the flight deck when a pilot is absent etc.
My comments above reflect my understanding of current U.S. thinking on declaring an emergency. In recent years it seems, to me, that we are taught to explicitly declare an emergency as a precaution even with a fairly minor abnormality.
But, as I observed earlier, there may be a good reason not to do so under the regs the EI wet lease crew were using.
Even though they didn't declare an emergency, I would suggest that it was a good thing the fire trucks were at the runway when the wheel fire broke out. As demonstrated recently with the BA 777 in LAS, even a 90 second delay can make a big difference.
Also, I get the strong impression that doing a crossing with a major hydraulic systems failure prior to going oceanic is less warmly embraced by the FAA than in years past. Of course, the bean counters would have you fly across on one motor if it saved the company money.
Thinking about it a little more and listening to the well edited LiveAtc recording, it may be the case that the EI 757 only had a left hydraulic failure without any flap asymmetry and chose not to do the crossing. The crew said there may be hydraulic fluid on the runway, did the failure occur at gear retraction perhaps? It would have been a flaps 20 landing back at JFK, possibly still overweight even with the holding while running the checklists.
I'm told some B-752's have fuel dump, I've never knowingly seen one. And a couple have inflight refueling.
Is there some place online a preliminary report of this incident will be posted?
I haven't seen anything so far on the FAA's Preliminary Accident and Incident web page.