"Even the airplane itself ultimately survived: after a marathon repair that lasted 535 days and cost $139 million, the A380 Nancy-Bird Walton triumphantly returned to the skies in 2012."

This quote amazes me. My understanding is that Airbus, Qantas, and probably Rolls Royce were willing to spend this much because it meant that the incident was not a "hull loss" and therefore not as bad a hit to reputation and safety statistics. Does anyone know if that's true?

A new A380 is more expensive (rule of thumb half of official list price, so about $220 million), and airlines were not talking about retiring A380s yet at the time. So it even made economic sense.

They paid an estimated $300M per aircraft, so even a $139M repair bill is worth it