The Dornier 328 turboprop has latches on the power levers that need to be raised to get into reverse. The problem is that you need to be on the flight idle stop before you raise the latches. If you raise the latches as you are retarding the levers to the stop, then they make the levers freeze in a position well short of flight idle, which is not a good thing.
If you then push the levers forward they should unfreeze and can then be retarded, but the normal reaction is to keep pulling back, which may only make them freeze all the harder. An Italian 328 crew ran right off the end of the runway in Genoa into the sea, when four people died, and another 328 crew later went off the end at Aberdeen, this time with no casualties and only minor damage.
When you look at this, it seems to be a German thing: The power lever design is very, very good, except that it's unforgiving of a mistake that someone not a German might easily make.
The design has never been changed, but crews have been advised not to make this mistake! I guess that if you crash now, you get a letter in your permanent file for not following German advice.
We had a real disaster in Lagos once, when a grass fire set off an ammo dump at the Ikeja Army Base right in the middle of town. (It turned out that there was a lot of munitions left over from the Biafra war that had been left there and forgotten.)
We watched the show from the roof of the BRC, when it was one hell of a fireworks display, multiple heavy detonations, and tracer rounds flying off in random directions, followed by a stream of panicky locals flooding down the street in front of us, when some of them were stampeded into a swamp and then trampled and drowned by those coming from behind.
We had already had the famous "Monkey Calendar." Now when it came time for the company Christmas cards one of SASless' friends, and mine, showed me his idea for the Christmas card, asking me what I thought of it. On the front, instead of some hokey Christmas tree or perhaps Santa Claus, there was this big, glowing explosion from the Ikeja Army Base, as captured by one of us from the roof of the BRC!
I nixed that one, not that it ever was a serious candidate ... or at least I hope it was not. I can't remember what we got instead, maybe six monkeys pulling Santa's sled.