Originally Posted by
aterpster
The airlines don't want to pay for such training. $$$ They would rather write off the rare loss of both engines. If they went there, then you get into sim training for a ditching far out in the ocean or over the polar routes.
There is a bit of a Catch 22 when it comes to what is required simulator training. Simulator time is a finite quantity, so the emphasis is on the sort of things a crew is most likely to encounter - such as engine failures. When a scenario becomes sufficiently rare, the regulators don't want to waste simulator time training for something that the crew is highly unlikely to ever experience.
I've had debates with the FAA about how the crew would handle an extremely rare failure - to wit the FAA wanted the fault considered catastrophic (and hence we needed to come up with a design such that it would
never happen) - and we argued that the failure wasn't that difficult to deal with if the crew knew what to do. To which the FAA said isn't not practiced in the simulator so we need to assume the crew wouldn't react appropriately. We'd say 'add it to the simulator training', to which they'd respond 'it's too rare to be included in simulator training'. Catch 22...
Dead stick forced landings are extremely rare - and a surprisingly large percentage of those have happy endings (Sully, Gimli Glider, previously mentioned TACA). Given finite training resources, you can't train for absolutely everything - as desirable as it might be.