heheh.
Having said that, if you mitigate the risks by pre-planning (e.g. avoid long over water sectors, stay in the circuit at night), you can lower the exposure -or- you can say to hell with it and accept the risk anyway, on the basis that life is dangerous anyway.
Im in trouble then....Fair comment about water - ditching is not pleasant and you dont have much time to live in reality regardless of conditions unless you have an appropriate dinghy.
Night - always stay in the circuit? I will put money on the fact that at ANY a/d in the UK that does night flying that you are outside gliding range for probably 60-80% of the time - if not more. You can thank the nimbys for that. EFATO is always possible after all isnt it? So the circuit wont help protect you here. For 0 risk you needed to say dont night fly. ho hum.
As an instructor with a fair few night training hours I see little point in taking the 'dont fly singles at night' attitude.
Firstly the Night Qualification *requires* navigation - as does issue of a commercial licence (although you could do it all on twins....at much greater cost...i.e. be very very rich....or exceedingly poor!). Second - you have the same risk of failure during the day - and if you examine the accident statistics then most night forced landings are survivable - provided you dont lose control of the aircraft and you use *different* techniques to day forced landings...and finally, thrid - twins are no better.....for instance a PA34 piper seneca doesnt climb on full tanks in the event of loss of one engine. It is often said on the seneca that having two engines just moves the crash site further away! (and yes I have registered a 150fpm rate of descent in a zero thrust, 5deg bank to live, blue line on one occassion during training...).
With regard to accidents the biggest killer is not engine failure - its CFIT followed by Loss of Control in VMC. Yes. VMC. And the biggest cause of engine failure is without a doubt engine mis-management (fuel/mixture/carb heat). A quick read through the accident reports included with GASIL will show this....
And as for the worst emergency at night - its not an engine failure
and it isnt the worst during the day either...has to be
1. catastophic structural failure (anytime)
2. fire (anytime)
3. total loss of electrics at night under IMC - and possibly compounded by icing conditions to boot! (i.e. loss of comms, nav as well as deicing equipment - which in most light a/c is electrically operated).
4. engine failure
I hasten to add that in situation 3 - Alternator Failure can ride that high too, as 30mins later (generally) the alt failure suddenly becomes 3. Just hope you can get down before nav is lost - and then before you run out of fuel!!!
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Back to the subject matter - Ive had partial loss of power twice. One unknown reason - possibly faulty primer leaking fuel through - over rich cause rough running. And the other was a throttle cable snapping on a twin cable/carb system. No engine failure yet....fingers and legs tightly crossed!!!