Originally Posted by
ecam
Maybe pilots should also sim train to immediately turn toward a suitable airport after a dual engine failure instead of flying away from it for another 30 seconds while trying to figure out what happened.
This comment just broadcasts your lack of experience. A professional pilots spends years learning to ignore the fight or flight instinct when something goes wrong in a plane. Very few emergencies require immediate action. In fact, many accidents could have been prevented if the crew simply took 30 more seconds to properly identify the problem.
A dual engine failure after takeoff is not something we prepare for. We don't know the exact distance we are from the airport. Making an immediate turn back based on feel would have been a gamble and as the NTSB showed, a risky gamble. Rather than react based on gut instinct, he took more logical actions that had a greater chance of saving the day. He had Skiles attempt an engine start while he asked ATC for landing options. Those actions allowed him to maintain aircraft control rather than run out of energy over a densely populated city.
Do you know the glide ratio of an Airbus? Do you know exactly how far you are from the runway? How much altitude would you lose in a 180 degree turn? That's a lot of information you need to gather (or more likely guess). Maybe in his years of experience, he saw plenty of pilots try to turn back to the airport only to run out of energy and lose control of the plane.
The only reason you "know" he could have turned back was because lots of crews got to practice this in the sim. They had 2 big advantages. 1: They knew both engines were going to fail and 2: They weren't going to kill anyone while they practiced. While you think he is a bad pilot for not instantly making the turn back, the truth is, he was right at the very edge of the window for a possibly return. What you are proposing is the same as a crew guessing where they think V1 is. That is what he had to do. He had to make a judgment call and just like V1, the statistics show that unless you KNOW you are below V1, you are better off continuing.
So unless you know the minimum altitude and speed you need to be to turn back and land for EVERY one of your takeoffs, I wouldn't comment on 1549.