AirJing; What is your background?
Your calculation for glide-ratio shows that you are completely clueless.
Glide ratio will depend on many things, such as wind milling prop, configuration, actual atmospheric condition, air density, actual winds on the day. You generally try to land into wind, this means shortening your glide distance, you try to land as slow as possible, by extending flaps, again shortening your glide distance, I assume it was hot weather, again this will give you less lift, and shorten your glide distance. So your theory is crap, put garbage information in the computer, and you get garbage information out of it.
Why do you presume the following: "The airplane would have had a solid nose down attitude"
Again the nose attitude, aircraft attitude, would depend on all of the above. Did they have full flaps? Or was the aircraft clean? If clean they would have had a very high nose pitch, so not much would have been visible of the ground below them.
Best glide ratio in clean configuration with a windmilling prop, and still wind might give you that suggested ratio, however we do not live in a perfect world.
Again you have very little time to make decisions, and lets not fool ourselves who wants to take the option to die by choice, if there is hope of a safe landing?
Furthermore, the instructor also had the responsibility of the "student" flying with him, what would the parents of this "trainee pilot" have said, if the instructor took a gamble to ditch, which might have killed the student pilot.
In the end this was a tragic accident, there options was limited in the time-frame given for them to make a choice.
I feel for the people who lost their lives, and their families, it is awful for all of them.
But the one thing we all no, in case of emergencies, there are no longer any rules, if it can save lives. In this case it saved the Instructor and his student, and I am sure they will not sleep lightly after this either.
To many flight sim experts making stupid comments about things they don't know anything about.
Last edited by BusAirDriver; 3rd Aug 2017 at 19:42.