No twin engined aircraft can climb with one propeller windmilling. You should know that instinctively!
Absolutely
INCORRECT!
To use just one example - both Clarrie and I have a few hours on the Dash from previous lives. The 1/2/300 series ALL have MEL's for dispatch with autofeather inop. Yes, there is a weight penalty, which will guarantee compliance with 20.7.1b.
Most operators (as did the one I worked for) covered training for such situations in the
simulator during the cyclic program on a very regular basis. All fairly routine, as I'm sure
Clarrie will attest to. These exercises were conducted with the aircraft configured in the assumption that autofeather was operating (ie no weight penalty). The aircraft still climbed prior to the condition lever being moved to Start/Feather during the recall actions.
I'm sure there are other aircraft which can dispatch with inop autofeather/NTS.
To make a broad sweeping statement that an aircraft
will not climb with a windmilling prop shows a lack of understanding (or experience) on propeller driven aeroplanes. Particularly turboprops.
I'm sure the guys involved in this crash were doing what was a fairly routine training exercise, only conducted in the aircraft. I'm not going to express an opinion on the merit or otherwise of what happened yesterday. I'll leave that to the experts.