the the aircraft is actually ground referenced, for acceleration and deceleration.
No, it isn’t. The relevant accelerative forces - thrust, drag, and lift - are all ‘air referenced’, for want of a better term. (And as has already been pointed out, the change in velocity is the same, regardless of the frame of reference.)
If you want to reference the aircraft to something other than the airmass it’s flying in, what’s so special about the local surface of the earth? Why not the centre of the earth? Or the sun? Or a passing bus? And of course the earth’s rotation means the surface has a speed ranging from 900 kts at the equator down to zero at the poles, so maybe the downwind turn theorists need to factor this into their specious equations, with a cos latitude term.