A few thoughts,
YFB is not difficult to land in under the conditions that day. ILS to a decent length runway into wind and a fairly large area to park.
If they shut the aircraft down in the cold, they would definitely want to drain the water to avoid possible damage from frozen water in pipes etc. But there is a good chance that it will be kept warm.
Somebody mentioned about why they didn't go to Vancouver which is 1 hour away. It is more like 4 hours away. That is why. You are required to go to the nearest suitable airport. Nearest time-wise that is which is not necessarily, your ETOPS alternate. That being said, the PIC can determine what is suitable and what is not, and a legal alternate may not be suitable. I have seen an ETOPS alternate where the runway conditions were 3/3/3 and no plowing at the present time. Performance calculations(airport is not even in the performance database and has to be manually created) showed that you had to dump to max landing weight and were just barely able to land within the limits. Legal but not suitable in my opinion. I do know of one airline overflying a suitable remote airport with a twin having shut down an engine on directions from the company. The government agency wasn't happy but the boss was.
Landing at a remote airport like this does present some logistical difficulties including the cold at this time of year and getting an engine to location. I remember a United 777 diverting to YZF due to an engine problem. Took two weeks to get the plane out of there. As the engines get bigger, so do the size of the aircraft required to fly them. C130's are fine for a 767 engine but the GE90 requires something really big. UA used a 747 to fly their replacement engine, but, YZF had no Main Deck loader so they flew it to Edmonton and trucked it up to YZF in the middle of the winter including crossing a winter time ice road across the Mackenzie River. United has their own group of specialists for this kind of situation, who I'm sure were not happy when it went down to -38 on the night of the engine change.
I have done the cargo flying of a replacement engine, a CFM 56 for an A340 over to Hawaii. Usually you wait around for the old engine to be removed which may already be part way there, as much as possible by the time you arrive with the replacement. In our case, we were out of there the next day before they even had the new engine up and operating which is a bad idea on the part of the airline as a situation may arise where they need parts off the old engine. But the airline doesn't like to pay for the expensive waiting time of the freighters sometimes. And seeing as your freighter may be the only one around, the charges may be steep. So we left early before the engine was up and running and when we got back home after a long expensive flight, we found out that they had problems with the replacement engine(electrical stuff) and couldn't start it. So we did another ferry flight back to Hawaii with a new replacement engine. Heard GE foot the bill for that one.
I wonder if there is an insurance policy available for this kind of situation.
Last edited by JammedStab; 7th Feb 2017 at 19:55.