Thanks ladies and gents. Kinda my sentiment and it would depend on the day. Lets put it like this. ( maybe I should write stories)
You take off from say Birmingham( short runway) in your big jet. The engine fails. Mr Boeing says if you take off from it you can land on it. OK so this time the rwy is contaminated ( standing water). Your stopping distance at the highest possible take off weight for the conditions is only giving you a fewhundred metres spare.( you will have to fly just like the test pilots). Its not in question if you have had a fire ( it will bring the test pilot skills out in you). However if it has just flamed out , what about the possibility of flying down the road to say MAN and jettison enroute ( if its allowed) reducing your weight slightly before you arrive and have a longer runway as well. You might argue that the time it took to get there was required to ensure the safest operation and that Manchester was more suitable from a performance point of view. Therefore you did land at the nearest suitable airport.
Bearing in mind too that if you were to check the actuall figures by opening the manuals in flight. This would no doubt also take a few minutes to check ( perhaps those same valuable minutes you could use whilst enroute to Manchester).
or do we not approach this with so much detail and simply land on it because we took off on it ? if there are any incident investigation types out there , how about your take on it. It would be interesting to see what the regulators might think.
PS. taildraggers still rule.