If the plane can’t dump fuel and has to remain in the sky anyway, why didn’t they just continue the flight and thereby minimize the inconvenience to the passengers?
Really: you’re going to be in the air all that time, might as well get where you’re going!
They cannot continue the flight with the loss of one of the hydraulic systems.
If you have a dire emergency, you just land overweight. Landing overweight is permissible and requires extra maintenance and checks.
If it’s a minor emergency, you take your time and burn the fuel off. You fly low and dirty to increase fuel usage.
If your plane has the fuel dump system, then you can dump the fuel.
If the emergency is extreme, and you must get down now, even fuel dumping will take too long, so you begin dumping fuel as you prepare to land, and you dump fuel all the way down until the last moment.
{I}If the plane can’t dump fuel and has to remain in the sky anyway, why didn’t they just continue the flight and thereby minimize the inconvenience to the passengers?
Really: you’re going to be in the air all that time, might as well get where you’re going!{I}
Really? You are advocating departing the proximity of an airport, with rescue and firefighting equipment after you have had a single or double systems failure?
Really?
{I}If the plane can’t dump fuel and has to remain in the sky anyway, why didn’t they just continue the flight and thereby minimize the inconvenience to the passengers?
Really: you’re going to be in the air all that time, might as well get where you’re going!{/I}
Really? You are advocating departing the proximity of an airport, with rescue and firefighting equipment after you have had a single or double systems failure?
Really?
Why? To remain in sight and glide distance of an airport that supports emergency services.
Excellent!
Hydraulic problems on an aircraft sometimes (often) increase in severity as time progresses. When you have a situation like that you want to stay as close to your runway as possible. Even though they stayed up to burn off fuel to reduce the risk of a catestrophic landing incident, they were always balancing the rick of landing overweight with the controlability problems they were experiencing. Has their hydraulic situation gotten worse they may have been forced to put the aircraft down, despite being overweight.
It was a bad situation that could have got much worse, pretty quick...and that “aw shit” moment wouldn’t be a good time to be an hour from the nearest runway.