Reading about the crash of Vôo da American Airlines 191, the proximate cause of the final loss of control was the pilots' reduction of the aircraft's airspeed to V2, in compliance with the published procedures for a single engine failure after V1 during takeoff in a DC-10-10; unbeknownst to the pilots, the damage caused when the #1 engine separated from the aircraft had caused the left wing's outboard slats to retract, decreasing the left wing's stall angle, with the result that decelerating to V2 required the aircraft to fly at an angle of attack at which the left wing stalled.
But why would one even quer to slow to V2 in the first place? Even if we, like McDonnell Douglas, ignore the possibility of an engine separating from the airplane and damaging it to the process, there are still good reasons to go faster, not slower:1
- If an engine has failed, there's no way to immediately know whether it's a contained or an uncontained failure; if it's an uncontained failure (which is, unfortunately, a common enough occurrence to demand consideration when designing an aircraft), there's a very good (or bad) chance that the exploding engine (especially if it's a wing-mounted engine, like the DC-10's #1 engine) has damaged the aircraft's flight control systems, in which case you'll want to be flying as fast as possible in order to maximise the control authority of the surviving controls.
- If there's a chance that whatever caused the first engine to fail could also take out the remaining engines (for instance, contaminated fuel or a flock of birds), you'll want to get as much speed reserve as possible, so that, if the remaining engines do fail, you'll be able to zoom-climb and reach your best-glide speed at the highest possible altitude, thus giving you the most time and space to do something.
What good reason could there possibly be for eroding your already-degraded safety margins yet further by slowing to V2 following an engine failure?
1Not that doing so was justifiable of their part (it wasn't, as the NTSB accident report makes clear).