John Farley. Thanks for the info. If it was fuel starvation then it wasn't what I had initially thought when I first read the Flight International newsclip.
My experience with all four props feathering at one button push was on a Long Nose Lincoln Mk 31 around 1959. I was a QFI on type when an engine fitter told me that he had just discovered during an engine run and prop feathering ground tests that he had feathered all four with one button.
We proceeded to the offending aircraft and did a quick check feather by pushing each feather switch and as soon as the prop began to feather we cancelled the action by pulling out the button (same as Dakota feathering). All was well. The four buttons are (were in those days) protected against inadvertent operation, by a metal cage assembly with the buttons recessed. Each button had an integral fire warning light in the button along with a sliding metal dimmer. Why you would want a dimmer I don't know.
If you ever so carefully (after a test feather) pushed one feather button slightly in, and then slid the dimmer switch to full extension so that it just touched the protective cage, then select any other feather button and push it in, all props would immediately feather!
We did this several times on this particular Lincoln but could not reproduce the defect on the other Lincolns.
Years later I read where the RAF had lost several Lancasters which had lost all four engines when feathering just one. I even talked to the survivor of one of the Lancs that crashed over France. he managed to bale out through the front hatch but knew that all props had feathered after having lost one engine the engineer feathered it.
Then came a book called Flight of the Halifax by Captain G. Wikner where he described losing all four in a Lancaster during a normal test flight on 3rd August 1944 during a delivery from Strathaven to Scampton. Part of the scedule was to feather each engine en-route. During the unfeathering of one engine, all remaining propellers feathered themselves. He got a couple going before diverting seriously alarmed to Skellingthorpe. The Lancaster was placed under armed guard and Wikner was told that four Lancasters had crashed killing their crews when all props had feathered.
In the case of the Long Nose Lincoln, it was 40 years later when by chance I ran into the same engineer who had demonstrated the problem to me. To my surprise he told me that they had located the source of the problem just a few days after I had witnessed it. All this time I thought it was a mysterious gremlin and had dined well on the story.
Seems that when a dimmer switch lightly touched the metal cage surrounding the four buttons, under some circumstances a current was generated that actuated the feather circuits on all buttons. The fix was simply to move the cage out slightly so that there was no way metal to metal contact could be made. As all RAAF Lincolns were grounded due main spar corrosion a month or so after the episode that I saw, the subject just faded away.
The Flight International snippet got me going again.