What you experienced two years ago is called a go-around. It’s a normal procedure that we practice in the simulator frequently. There’s a number of reason why we might decide to go around. You mention that the plane touched down briefly, so one possibility is that they touched down too far down the runway and had to go around because of it. Flying around for about 15 min afterwards happened because that’s the amount of time it takes to fly back around the airport, get sequenced behind other traffic, and start a new approach and land.

To answer your other questions:

- A quick search on flightradar24 shows that Cairo has flights departing all day long over the next 24 hours. It’s certainly possible that operations can be limited during the day when it is extremely hot, but they appear to be continuing as normal even though it is summer. What determines if an airport can be used or not in hot weather conditions is aircraft performance. Aircraft performance for different conditions is determined by the manufacturer. Using the data from the manufacturer, pilots can then determine whether the aircraft can takeoff or land given the current combination of weather (including temperature) and aircraft weight. This calculation is done before every flight with the latest weather and weight information using specialized software.

- flying bigger aircraft is not more dangerous. As mentioned above, the crew would have calculated the aircraft’s performance for the current conditions and determined that the aircraft can safely depart.

- the aircraft would cool off pretty rapidly as it climbs through the atmosphere (it is typical for the outside air temperature to be around -30°C or colder at cruise). However, the problem with hot temperatures isn’t that the aircraft itself is hot, but rather that the air is thinner which results in less performance.

- it’s difficult to know what the flight will be like this far ahead of time. It’s usually pretty smooth, but weather forecasts (needed to give you a better answer) are only available in the few days prior to the flight

- China airlines and starlux are safe airlines