As a low hour pilot this thread has got me thinking more about this again so it can only be a good thing. It's even got me researching more about it. I came across this post by Jim Davis on the Avcom forum discussing the same topic. with Jim Davis being quite well known and repected for his opinion by many I thought i would share. I hope he doesn't mind me posting here.
"OK let me have one last try.
I consider myself to be reasonably experienced, I also consider myself a thinking pilot. I have spent much of my life teaching pilots not to do it. And yet when the chips were down one night I found myself throwing the aircraft into the impossible turn.
What I am saying is that in that moment of disbelief and panic your thinking goes out of the window. My instincts took over from my logic. Of course I knew that I could never get back to the runway from 3 or 400 ft and yet I tried it and was only rescued from my stupidity by the engine recovering. If it hadn't I would not be writing these words - I would have been planted long ago.
Now I am going to look at it from another angle. Let's take a figure - say 800 ft. You know from experience that you can just make it back on to the runway from 800 ft over the upwind threshold. So if you are at 750 ft you are going to die. What percentage of the time do you find yourself over the upwind threshold at 800 ft or above in a light single? Shall we say a generous 5%. Although I think you could sit at Rand watching takeoffs for a very long time without seeing such a takeoff.
OK now lets try to combine these two bits of information. If there has to be a rule for all takeoffs, the safest one would be land within a sensible arc ahead. NEVER try to turn back.
Your argument says why should competent, thinking pilots have to abide by a rule if they can, on 5% of the cases, think and fly their way safely round such a rule?
My answer is that competent and thinking pilots stop being competent and thinking when faced with the overriding panic that goes with knowing your life expectancy is measured in seconds and depends entirely on your actions during those seconds.
Now I must introduce one more factor. We have to take another guess. What are your chances of survival if you limit your choice of landing places to a 180 degree arc (90 degrees either side of straight ahead). OK this is a big guess because if you only operate out of Rand your chances are very different to only operating out of say Kimberley. But let's put a figure to an "average" field, if there is such a thing, and call it 70% survival. I think it's actually far greater, but let's settle for 70%. It is just a gut feel I have from knowing many pilots (including myself) who have walked away unscathed from EFATO. In fact I know of only one who landed ahead and did not survive.
Now lets try to remember how many cases we know of where otherwise competent pilots killed themselves by spinning in from the "impossible turn". Plenty.
And lets try to remember how many cases we know of where pilots have saved their lives by landing back on the runway. I don't know of any.
So I have to ask, if your son was learning to fly, and you wanted to give him a stay-alive rule to last him for the first 1000 hours (until he became a competent and thinking pilot) what rule would you give him?
Perhaps I can put if more graphically. Let's have someone chatting to you on the phone while watching your son take off. "There he goes, climbing away... oh, shit the engine has failed... " Would you like the next words to be "... he's trying to turn round. or "...he's put the nose down and is landing straight ahead."?
If it is a top aerobatic pilot who has climbed to 1500 ft in his Extra his chances of turning round are good.
But I am looking at this whole thing from an instructor's perspective. I know what I have to teach 95% of pilots 95% of the time.
And I have to give the following quick reminder to the other 5% - the thinking pilots - you probably stop being a thinking pilot when it actually happens to you.
I have nothing further to contribute to this discussion - that has exhausted my experience (4 EFATOs in singles) and my thoughts on this subject.
Jim"
Link to the thread: http://www.avcom.co.za/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=69920&start=30