number of incident reports indicating successful engine failure turnbacks.
Why would there be? The incident report would say "aircraft made emergency landing after power failure". There would be no NTSB investigation (or equivalent) so no documentation of the exact circumstances. You might equally say "I've read about accidents that have happened when aircraft are landing, and it must be awfully dangerous because I've never seen any accident reports about successful landings".
My only goal in doing this was to find MY personal minimum in MY plane (I will not be trying this in the Pitts!), and to have experience doing it in a low-stress context so if it ever really happens I won't be thinking "gee, I wonder if this works".
graduated beyond using airspeed as an indication of AoA
What would you suggest using, in a plane that doesn't have an AoA indicator (i.e. 99.99% of them)?
In any case there are much better indications of stall than any of this - though the 182 (mine anyway) has very little buffet, unlike the Pitts. Keeping airspeed way above the theoretical stall speed is just a handy way to avoid the problem. And I can recover a stall in less than 100', but I'd rather not be put to the test at 101' AGL if I can avoid it.
I confess to being baffled by this recurring statement that bank angle does not in itself tell you stall speed, in a steady state. One now-deleted and unmissed post said something about "stall speed could be anywhere from 40-80 knots at 45 degrees of bank" (for an aircraft whose Vs is 50 knots). I'm a pilot, not an aerodynamicist, so it's possible that the greatly oversimplified elementary texts I consult (e.g. Aerodynamics for Naval Aviators) chose to miss out something important, I guess. I'd like to know what it is.
So, let's try this one more time. In a steady bank at a steady horizontal and vertical airspeed, stall speed = sqrt(sec(angle of bank)) * (straight and level stall speed in the same configuration). What is the missing "mystery factor" that makes this not true?