These discussions on in flight emergencies such as engine failures and failures of other components in airplanes has brought me to sharing what I have learned over the years about PDM and how to handle these issues.
My first advice is when something goes wrong don't do anything until your brain recognizes what is happening and then act.
An airplane has inertia...be it either in motion or standing still.
The heavier the airplane the more inertia will either help or hinder you.
So lets look at a failure I had many decades ago in a PBY water bomber carrying long term retardant off a gravel forestry strip.
During a take off with a very strong X/wind fully loaded with long term retardant just as we were almost at VR the left hand throttle broke off, with the result being I was about to get airborne with an engine at full power and no throttle control.
In this case inertia was working against me as it was increasing very fast.
I took the few split seconds to identify the problem and make the correct decision on how to handle the problem...and that was to abort the take off as there was enough room ahead of me to stop before I went outside the boundaries of the airstrip.
.....my training over the years had been that to reject a take off you closed the throttles first.....but in this case I would have lost control because if I closed the throttles one of them was not connected to the quadrant anymore and I would have been riding in a 1200 HP tree cutter as the airplane tore its way through the trees alongside the runway with one engine at full take off power.
That short time I did nothing except think, gave me the opportunity to make the correct decision which was to turn all the mags off with the emergency cut off pull button and at the same time select idle cut off on both mixture controls.
With both engines dead I then punched the emergency retardant drop button and got rid of ten thousand pounds of long term retardant and applied full braking...we ended up about two hundred feet past the end of the runway on the grass and fortunately not in the trees.
That moment of doing nothing until my brain got in gear allowed us to live to fly another day.
So the lesson to be learned is never do something stupid fast.
By the way the airport was real easy to identify after that with almost half the runway bright red from the load of retardant we dumped down it.
