I apologise, Olster, but the first part of your post makes no sense to me. You say the incident wasn’t at night, but the report states that it happened at 1621z, or 2205 LT, so it most definitely was night, being about 3 1/2 hours after sunset. You also say the weather was fine, with no thunderstorms, but we can’t draw that information from the report. It states that both crew members were aware of the bad weather in Kathmandu, and the latest METAR given in the report was at 0820, eight hours before the incident occurred, so totally pointless as far as the report is concerned. Even if they had included a weather report at the time just because it’s fine at VNKT doesn’t necessarily meant it’s fine in the valley between GURAS and the KTM. So I don’t see how we can discount the fact that the PIC may have had bad weather in his mind when he decided to reject, just from that report.
You also mention the HS748 crash at Stansted. This has, as you say, no relevance to the accident at Kathmandu, as at Stansted they didn’t reject above V1, they got airborne and then landed straight ahead on the remaining runway. However I think it is very relevant to the subject of simulator training, emergency drills and decision making. Had they continued into the air and carried out the standard drills and requested vectors back to land at Stansted they would have been airborne probably for fifteen minutes, and had the fire not gone out maybe the wing would have failed structurally. Maybe it wouldn’t, no one will ever know, but what we do know is that as a result of the Captains decision that night everyone walked away from it, and the AAIB report stated that the decision was sensible in the circumstances. Personally I think that every pilot be they young or old, flying 737 or any other type should be aware of that accident, and think outside the box. It’s really easy to say that in the simulator rejecting after V1 will require a retest, so we should never do it. But when we are accelerating down the runway, passing 150 kts and above V1 and suddenly something happens that makes us think that the aircraft is unsafe or unable to fly should we never stop? In a 737 on a 2000 metre runway probably not. But on a 4000 metre runway when we’ve got 2500 metres of it still in front of us, why not ? Real life isn’t the simulator. In real life we can’t be certain of the outcome of a scenario because we know what failures we’ve programmed, what speed we’ve armed the engine failure at, whether the fire will extinguish on the first bottle, or the second, or not at all ?