Hi all.
While reading about the recent Melbourne Kingair accident, I've been seeing 'feathering' mentioned a lot, so trying to understand what it is (Non-pilot, so excuse my poor lingo here).
I've been googling, and it seems it's a way for the pilot to a) reduce drag on a failed engine and b) protect the engine from windmilling (Possibly causing further damage). And what happens is the blades are angled so that they cut cleanly into the airflow (So, leading edge of the prop into the wind?). And that helps cause wind resistance in the spinning direction, as the blade is flat (Like a cricket bat? Unless you're playing a cut shot..
)
And if all is OK, (i.e. You have time), you would then attempt to restart it.
Would you un-feather .. (de-feather... not sure what the term is) it to start it, as now it's in a resistance mode (Trying to stop it from spinning). Or is the engine powerful enough not to care about that. I'd have guessed that running a prop when it's feathered would strain the engine, and be pretty useless for providing thrust? So, would the engine be started while feathered.. and then ... de-feathered completely to run normal again?
And then auto-feather - does that mean the engine is feathered automatically in the event of a failure? If so, why would you ever disable auto-feather?