Now, now, boys, lets keep the party polite!
It is always entertaining for the rest of us mortals to see the pilot with the highest opinion of his own ability come unstuck.....
So let me lighten this thread with a story about an Engine Failure on Takeoff that completely satisfied all the witnesses.
For the first time EVER, the Chief Flying Instructor's wife agreed to come up with him in the motor glider, a Falke. (She felt safer in an aircraft with an engine!) The craft was preflighted. Taxied to the end of the gliding club runway, engine run up, and takeoff, towards the clubhouse, commenced. At a height of approx. ten feet the engine stopped.
(The equivalent for us as a cable break at low level) The Chief Instructor handled the power failure with superb technique and managed to stop before flying into the clubhouse. His wife climbed down and said she was never going up again, never!
The Chief Instructor was incandescent. "This airplane is unfit to fly! It will have to be grounded immediately until the Engineer has gone over this engine! Somebody could have been hurt!" etc etc etc.
Until another pilot, well experienced with the Falke, asked the question
"Did you check that the fuel was turned on?"
Silence.
Confirmation. The fuel was NOT turned on. (The custom had been that the fuel was normally left turned on...on this occasion a visitor had ended his flight by turning it off.)
The wife of the Chief Instructor, when sitting in the RH seat of the Falke, and being of somewhat ample proportion, made it impossible to verify the position of the fuel cutoff lever.....
I'm not sure whether a formal report was ever made, but we never let him forget it! No names, no pack drill.