I knew an engineer who was along for the ride in a Baron, in Tanzania, I think it was. He described how one of their donkeys died at altitude yet the pilot failed to feather the engine. The speed decayed, the aircraft descended and they finally landed on a railway with a terrible thump, breaking the engineer's leg. Well, he must have survived, since he told me the story, but...
Long ago, in the U.S.A., we could commit all sorts of comercial aviation with a Commercial licence. For airliners, you needed an ATP but otherwise a CPL did just fine. So some unfortunate holder of a CPL lost an engine on a Navajo while departing from 10 thousand feet of our finest concrete. He could, of course, have simply landed on what was left, or perhaps tried to feather the failed engine and gone for blue line to see what that should bring. Instead he got into a big argument with drag and gravity, and drag and gravity won, when he rolled his Navajo into a big ball and the FAA in its wisdom made everyone get an ATP. Sigh... So those two Colgan pilots who managed to stall and then go straight in in a nice, new Dash 8 through what seems like mind-boggling failures of basic airmanship... ATP holders both of them!
I don't know why it is, but hanging two engines on just about anything does seem to bring out the optimist in almost all of us. Should we bring back the tri-motor?