Yes, 90s is a long time, but I doubt these guys were thinking 100% straight. They'd just been thrown about the cockpit, clearly shocked and confused, and the last thing you want to do is evacuate passengers into running engines.
Fair enough. Which is why I shouldn't compare these 90 secs. to some idealistic, hypothetical metric of mine.
But, what might make sense is to compare this crew to previous hull losses with evacs. ordered. Does anyone know (anecdotally or in a study) how long pilots have taken to complete the checklist and order an evac.?
Of course, someone's going to say "every crash is different". Sure, but there's some value in benchmarking. If the median evac. order is issued in 9 secs. and they took 90 it's at least a hunch to dig deeper. If the median evac. order takes 2 minutes, let's move on.
In operator I work for, and I presume most, remember when the situation is clearly catastrophic / dire, the CC can evacuate on their own initiative.
I know a lot of CC here were incapacitated. But at least two were not. Wonder what CC training says about the line between initiating an evac. versus waiting for the flight deck's call.
One criteria to be considered is only evacuating for a "confirmed, unextinquished" fire. That often requires external information - when they got that the evac went ahead.
If they hadn't got this confirmation, how long would they have stretched out those 90 secs. What's the next step on the crash response protocol.