Julian,

Why the dive? Does the airplane have unfeathering accumulators (I've
instructed in Twinkies but don't recall ever being in one with
accumulators)? With or without them, you should not have had to dive
the airplane. (That part of your post bothers me in that I can't
think of what would make it necessary.)

Have a long chat with your mechanic. I've never had problems with
airplanes with accumulators. Without them, there have been a few
times where it took as many as ten or fifteen brief sessions with the
starter to get the prop to windmill and the engine to start, but I'm
usually just patient and careful not to overwork the starter. (All of
that assumes warm weather. On cold weather shutdown and feather
exercises I start the engine again immediately otherwise it can cool
down very fast and I've been told it may or may not restart.) I also
do the exercise up high and very near an airport that is adequate for
a landing if I can't get the offending engine to snort and bellow
again, although in over 25 years of giving multi-engine instruction I
haven't had that happen yet.

All the best,
Rick

"Julian Scarfe" wrote in message ...
As part of a "debugging" process yesterday, chasing a collection of minor
issues, we tested the feathering of the left engine of our Twin Comanche,
which had appeared significantly slower than the right one. It seemed to
feather fine, with the prop stopping in about 10 seconds.

Unfortunately, it didn't restart fine. I was very close to a "uh, we've
painted ourselves into a corner, here" call to ATC and a real engine-out
arrival, when at the 6th attempt in a 1000 fpm dive at 130 KIAS it finally
came back to life. Fortunately we'd been careful to get ourselves plenty of
altitude before the shutdown.

Any tips on air restarts from the other PA30 drivers out there? I think we
followed the POH to the letter, in particular, mixture RICH for the start.
Is that really best? Why does it differ from the ground start procedure?

Julian Scarfe