Twin Couldn't Maintain Altitude Before Freeway Crash Landing

I agree that the P2006T needs a larger engine than the carbureted 912. But that would require either a gross weight increase or a significant drop in useful load. Larger engines would add about 80 pounds to the empty weight and the current useful load is not great. The cabin is roomy and there is plenty of baggage space, so the plane is easy to overload if not careful. Great plane, but engine performance is an issue.

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Getting my ME and MEI inflight shutdowns were not unusual. We NEVER did these at a DA that would not allow us to climb, maybe at the rate of an overloaded C-150, but we could do it. Having to do it for real later on, I am really really glad it was not the first time.
I have never flown the Tecnam twin and have no desire to after reading the review in AOPA, at sea level its ability to climb seemed worse than a clapped-out Apache. It seems to be a quite marginal twin on a good day. Using one around Denver is nuts. I once flew a Duchess to Denver in the summer and our SE service ceiling was 2,000 feet below ground level. An engine failure there would have been an extended glide to someplace nice hopefully. You have essentially a single with 8 cylinders with half on each wing. No way is that Tecnam an appropriate airplane for training there and I would never have dreamed of trying a shutdown over that terrain in the Duchess.

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If you are talking about engine failures while still on the runway, you are correct. The Duchess I got my ME in could accelerate to Vr and stop again in a little under 4,000 feet, an engine cut at Vr needed 11,000 feet to clear the proverbial 50 foot tree standard day. Needless to say you never trained anyone to try that. This is not bad training, it is how the airplane flies. If you want to train the V1 concept you need more power, so that comes in when the student moves up to such a plane, no use training someone to fly a Citation if they bought an Aztec.
You CAN train people in the concept of transport flying, you need to do this for 135 ops in even the lightest twin. The POH should give you what you need for balanced field calculations and climb rates on one engine. The most important first lesson I taught was by definition the SE climb rate is going to be bad because if it wasn’t the manufacturer is leaving gross weight and thus marketing on the table, they’ll set it higher and sell more planes. You as the pilot can very much work backwards from a desired SE climb rate to the weight you are comfortable with. This will lead you down the road to buying a turbocharged airplane for Denver too :wink:

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