The Airbus A380 is a beast. It’s a double-decker, superjumbo passenger plane, with four engines and a wingspan greater than two Boeing 737s side by side. When it first started flying in 2007, airports had to upgrade their facilities to deal with it.

So imagine the nightmare of dealing with this plane at an airfield where it was never meant to land. Such is the plight of Air France engineers and French investigators, who must bring the airline's damaged A380 back to Europe.

The plane had to make an emergency landing at a remote military airport in Canada last month. The experience sounds harrowing: As the plane flew over Greenland on its way between Paris and Los Angeles, passengers said they heard a loud bang. The front fan of one of the Airbus' four massive engines had disintegrated. Flyers felt some serious shaking before the plane settled down and flew on for two hours on the remaining three engines. It landed at tiny, remote Goose Bay Airport—a mostly military airfield on the first bit of land the pilots came to. Passengers waited onboard for hours—the facility didn't have stairs large enough to accommodate the A380. Eventually, they caught two replacement jets to their final destinations.

Which is when the complicated logistics come in. One group of investigators raced by helicopter to collect pieces of the failed engines before they were covered in Greenland snow.

The plane itself, meanwhile, is still stranded in Canada. The first task there, for investigators from France’s air safety body, BEA, is to arrange for the mangled remains of the engine to be removed from the plane. Teams from Air France and Airbus will carefully separate that from the underside of the wing.

They'll fly that engine, which is about 10 feet in diameter, back to its manufacturers, General Electric, in Cardiff, Wales. It needs to be preserved for forensic analysis, so shipping it, rather than keeping it on the plane as it flies back to France, makes sense.

“If the engine is out there in the air stream, unless you put something over the inlet, it’s going to rotate, and it’s going to do further damage,” says Chuck Horning, who was an airline maintenance tech for 18 years, and now teaches the science of it at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Then the team will mount a spare engine in its place on the right wing. Here's the weird thing, though: The airline probably won't use it to power the plane back to France. The stand-in is there for weight balance, and won’t actually work, according to Reuters. BEA says the exact plan is still being studied.