From a pax point of view I wouldn’t have thought there was much difference between the A330 and the B767. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I think it’s great that they don’t want cabin altitudes greater than 6000’…but this is hardly new. This has been the case in the A330/340 for years. There are a lot of good features on the B787 however the press seem to be missing the important ones.

…running on three engines means that you’re only one engine failure away. So why do you want to reduce your margin of safety?

But this is the case in twins all the time and yet that is considered acceptable risk. The margin of safety when flying a quad with one engine shut down is the same as that on a twin when everything is working normally so I don’t understand where the word ‘sloppy’ fits in.

On a rolling three year cycle our training department makes us practice 2 engine out (on the same wing) descent, approach and landing and it really isn’t a big deal. Heck, we can even do 2 engine inop go arounds without any drama. If we needed to divert whenever a single engine failed there would be little point in having quads as all they would do is double your chance of a diversion!

Castor, flying 3 or 4 engined jets utilises a completely different set of thought processes when it comes to contingency planning when compared to the average twin (there are perhaps some minor differences to this when talking about aircraft designed from the outset for ETOPS such as the B777 and the A330).

Loss of an outboard engine on an A340 causes NO LOSS of any important system and loss of an inboard, despite resulting in the loss of one of the three hydraulic systems would not affect the way the aircraft flies at all (other than an increase in landing distance of 10% and a requirement to have visual contact with the runway by 50′ at the latest!). The cruise level would come down (not always the case on the A346!) and the fuel burn would typically increase by approximately 9% so as long as we have started with a sensible amount (not used our contingency, additional, etc) you can see that a single engine failure is not really a particularly big deal. If we were to lose a second then the story changes and we are now in the same boat as an A320 or a B757.

There are many more thoughts going through the flight crews heads than you can imagine however I think you can be fairly certain that the cost of passenger compensation is almost immaterial.

I flew over to Dublin twice for Aer Lingus interviews in ’98. The whole process was just as much of a shambles as this! Not surprised! Like yours, the flights there and back were good though.

A340-600: min 132kt, max (normal weights) 151kt.

An immediate return for an overweight landing from a max weight take off with full flap available would give an approach speed (nil wind) of 188kt for a 183kt touchdown.

The more time you spend in the airline game, the shorter you want your trips to be!

14 is usually preferred by UK carriers as there is a big saving on flight time compared to an approach to 32. One thing you have to beware of though (as well as the “Spanish calm” Moondance talks about which is actually a stonking tailwind on the approach!) is the Spanish controllers frequently try to get you to ‘lock on’ the the localiser and glideslope well beyond their promulgated ranges. The signals can be very erratic outside the published ranges and you certainly wouldn’t want to be following a wayward signal between the mountains!