But the bottom line for your typical piston twin if the airspeed is decaying and the aircraft isn't climbing you need to close both throttles and take your lumps straight ahead.
That's technically completely correct, but I guarantee you that in the heat of the moment, very very few pilots would make that correct decision. 99.9% of them will instinctively pull back, because they want the nose of the aircraft to go up very much so. Just ask the kid flying the iced-up Colgan Air dash-8 into Buffalo about that, after he let the speed bleed off.
There was an airshow accident this year, and I think enough time has passed that I can mention it now without people sending me hate mail. I saw the video, and cringed even before it went bad, because I know exactly what happened.
A new airshow pilot tumbled his airplane at low altitude, and ended up in a vertical downline at an even lower altitude. Frankly, it doesn't get any better than that. What you do is apply full power, wait a second for the airspeed to build, then put all the G on.
Sounds simple, doesn't it? Well, this new airshow pilot simply hadn't earned the right to perform out-of-control aerobatics at low altitude. When he exited the tumble and was pointing straight down, with a whole windsheild full of grass, he panicked and pulled back on the stick before the airspeed had a chance to build. He snap-rolled it into the ground.
We can all talk here about what cool pilots we are, and what we're going to do under pressure, and I'm afraid it's 99.9% pure male bovine excrement. You threaten someone with imminent death, and 99.9% of the time they're going to panic and do the wrong thing.
Very, very few pilots are able to very quickly make the correct, hard choice.
I do spin training. Often when pilots are confronted with their first interesting spin,
they really don't perform very well. They freeze, panic, don't correctly observe
what's going on, and don't apply the right inputs.
Talking about making the hard choices is easy on the ground.