"The Impossible Turn"
What a crazily misleading expression!
Without specifying all sorts of criteria that statement is as empty and false as baldly stating that sunbathing will kill you with skin cancer. It makes good newspaper headlines but no more than that.
The ability to return to the t/o runway, or even the t/o airfield depends on a myriad of factors. Power-weight ratio, angle of climb, angle of descent in a glide, descent angle in a steep turn, distance from the field the event occurs at.
A Pitts might make a successful return before crossing the far threshold, a DC3 would never manage a glide return from any t/o profile..
I imagine even this bastardised and brutalised machine mightwell make it back if the return was instigated far enough from the field, but there must be a point inside which it physically cannot be acheieved, with the inevitable result.
It's the pilot's job to know his aircraft's performance characteristics and assess whether or not a turnback with a tailwind anding is either possible or prudent. I wonder how much experience any racing pilot has in assessing his aircraft's ability to wrack on a steeply descending 180' turn with a stopped paddle-blade prop and glide to a landing with a g/s far in excess of what they've ever seen before? Blimey! That's really stacking the odds.
The general advice then, that a 180' return to field in EFATO is' impossible' is actually pretty sound. It may not be striclty accurate in all cases but as general advice it will probably save a vast proportion of those so afflicted who might be tempted to defy all wisdom andthe laws of momentum/physics too.