At one point,the team reached almost 100,which was on top of a battalion of engineers at Rolls-Royce headquarters in Derby,Britain.
The pressure on investigators to pin down the problem and find a fix was intense. Importantly,they had to ensure the flying public was correctly informed.
As aviation experts from around the world focused on putting the pieces of the QF32 puzzle together,Dolan was in high-level talks with regulators from other countries,as well as Qantas,to ensure the safety of flights was maintained.
Within a month of QF32's near disaster,the ATSB had released a preliminary report detailing the immediate problem with its Rolls-Royce engine,the basic facts of the incident and a recommendation of what needed to be done to fix it in order to ensure similar aircraft were safe to fly.
But it would be more than 2 1⁄2 years before the ATSB released its final report into QF32.
While the ATSB has offered support to help find answers to flight 370,the Malaysian investigators'first task remains locating the Boeing 777 and retrieving vital flight-data recorders.
"Those initial stages,which are when you get most of your important information,are key to the rest of the investigation,"Dolan says.
"We think where we can most offer capability[to the Malaysians] is in the technical analysis side of the business – the data recorders and materials failure."
The demands on air-safety investigators are enormous in the aftermath of a major crash. The whole point of their work is to find holes in the system,and ensure it does not occur again.
"If they don't get it right,there is hell to pay,"says Jason Middleton,the head of the University of NSW's School of Aviation,citing the ongoing political fallout from the ditching of a Pel-Air plane off Norfolk Island in 2009. The search for answers to the crash of Air France 447,which was carrying 228 people on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009,tied up France's air-crash investigative unit for two years.
Flight 447 is regarded as the nearest incident to the disappearance of the Malaysia Airways passenger jet.
While the first debris from the Air France plane was found within several days,it would be two years before the black box which held answers to the crash was recovered from the depths of the South Atlantic.
The big question in the latest tragedy is how can a modern aircraft just disappear?
The Air France crash prompted work internationally on finding other ways to transmit information from planes,rather than relying on black boxes or other onboard data recorders. Proposals are afoot in some circumstances to transmit flight information to ground sites via satellite.
Dolan believes the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines'flight 370 will lead to a greater emphasis on this,and how authorities can make planes easier to locate in the event of a crash.
But he concedes that"because it is about developing international standards,it never happens quickly".
He adds:"We will always have a mismatch between being careful and methodical,which is our job,and providing the speed of response that is expected from both social media and the modern news media."