Well done for using this site to find out what went wrong.
Hopefully the company will have also explained things to you and you should now have a better picture of what occurred.
Believe it or not, pilot's don't actually get a lot of training in passenger handling and we only train with our own cabin crew once in a blue moon so it is very unlikely that we will be able to keep everyone happy and informed about a situation which does not go according to plan!
Every person on board an aircraft experiencing a technical problem will have a different perception of what is actually happening based on the information available to them and the best we can do is try to keep everyone as fully informed as we can.
Unfortunately not everybody will respond to the same information in the same way. Not all of the people on board will have seen the flames coming from the engine and will only need to be reassured that the aircraft is returning to the airport for technical reasons and it would not serve any good purpose to go into too much detail.
The pilots regularly fly the simulator on one engine and for the vast majority of us this is the only experience we will ever have of this sort of technical failure and it is done as a routine exercise twice per year. The
PR side of it is only really addressed in general terms and we have no training standards which apply.
Sorry for the unkind comments, but they do seem to highlight the gap in understanding between the general public and the pilot community and we do ourselves no favours at all by remaining ignorant of passenger perceptions.
Not sure how we can change this
