To be fair, while accelerating isn't necessarily what you want per se, you must maintain airspeed in an aeroplane if it loses engines. The instinct is to preserve altitude since hitting the ground is the key thing you don't want to happen - but if you preserve that altitude at the cost of losing airspeed (and now that you don't have engines you can't keep both) you will experience aerodynamic stall and fall out of the sky anyway.