I have a Seneca II and considering using it for flight training. I know the conventional wisdom (mentioned here and that I have repeated myself) that having turbos on a training aircraft is a bad idea. I wonder though if anyone has practical experience with this? For example, would one expect the turbos' life expectancy to be cut in half? Or worse?

One bad thing with turbos is rapid power reductions where you have a fast spinning turbo with reduced oil pressure. You can't just yank an engine on climb out but otherwise I'm not sure how the turbos would be stressed by typical training scenarios. Granted its been a few years since I taught ME students so I may be missing something.

In some regards the Seneca II is not a bad twin for ME training. It has great performance when lightly loaded so it would keep a student on his/her toes. It also has a good single-engine service ceiling (12,000 ft) so you can actually do some flying on one engine.