I think that a carefully flown Seneca II makes a great ME trainer...if it is flown correctly. We use them for JAR/EASA students and I am impressed with their performance and forgiving nature.

However, I would NEVER lease my Seneca II (and to be clear, this is a hypothetical, since I don't own one) back to a flight school for fear that it would be a financial nightmare.

The biggest issues would be care and MX of the engines and landing gear. The fixed wastegate makes setting the MAPs a nightmare for the new ME student and the possibility of overboost very real. Doing stalls and the like are not conducive to good care of the turbochargers, and again we have the likely overboost issues. And last, but not least, the aircraft tends to land very heavy and very flat....a good landing requires a lot of practice, particularly for a new ME pilot...in fact, I was told by the examiner who did my CFI a few years back that when she instructed in the PA-34, they would NEVER use flaps 40 --even for short field landings-- in an effort to get more of a pitch up attitude for landing.

I suppose it can be done...we use them, but the FTO that I work for has fairly deep pockets and a full time MX guy (who doesn't work on the aircraft) monitoring issues with our fleet.

But, they still break all of the time....and I would think that there is no way that leasing back just one to a flight school would be anything short of a recipe for a financial disaster.