Taildragger,
While yet to read David's article, I cannot disagree strongly enough with your conclusion on engine-out flight.
I was privileged to read through my old nav instructor's logbooks [his son had just dissuaded hiim from throwing them out!!], kept during WWII when he was a Coastal Command navigator on Beaufighters and Mosquito's. I was amazed that almost 1 in 3 flights resulted in coming home on one engine. This was over a full tour plus, so they can't have been that bad at asymmetric performance.
Indeed, the Mossie's were causing so much strife along the North Sea coast, that if a CC Mossie was downed, the German pilot got double points towards an Iron Cross. Having lost an engine to a JU88, his pilot dived away only flattening out at wave height and hi-tailed it home all the way from Denmark. The bloke was a big Canadian and Alan surmised that someone of lesser strength would have been unable to recover from the dive.
If you allude to engine failure after takeoff, that's another matter; there was a large dead-zone where the only answer was to pull off the live engine and land straight ahead!
G'day
