It is extremely unusual for a perfectly functioning light plane engine to just go bang with no warning (big radials are another story though....).
I have had 3 engine failures in light aircraft and all gave some warning
1) C 150: We were climbing out on a flight to the practice area when I noticed the oil pressure was a solid needle width below the white line in the middle of the green arc of those horrible cessna no numbers oil pressure guage. This was significant because on every other flight in this airplane the I had observed the oil pressure guage sitting exactly on the white line. I told the student to turn back to the airport. In the 3 minutes or so it took to get back to the runway the oil pressure slowly dropped to zero by the time we were on short final, so I shut everything down and we made an uneverntfull landing. It turned out the oil pump drive had failed. I got a very valuable piece of advice from an old timer early in my flying career. He said he never wanted me to say an engine guage was " in the green" he wanted me to give the instrument value because the tend in the guage was a very important indicator of impending trouble. In this case it saved me from a certain of off airfield landing as if I had waited untill the oil pressure dropped to below the green arc I never would have made it back to the airport.
2) PA31: Turbocharger and wasteagte failure. The aircraft suffered a catastrophic turbo failure which also caused the waste gate to fail in the fully closed position on the shuttle climb out of Tofino. The engine did not stop, but would not generate very much thrust. The choice was 100 miles over the rocks or a single engine NDB circle to land to minimums. The FO and I discussed the options and chose the landing which worked out fine. As it turned out 2 other pilots had added a total of 4 litres of oil to that engine in the previous 6 hrs
. They did not think this fact was worth reporting to maintainance
This failure was 100% preventable as the engine gave fair warning but the previous pilots were to stupid to notice.
3) Twin Commanche: Just as I had gotten established on the GS on an ILS approach the left engine ran down. Since the aircraft was stable on the appraoch I just feathered the engine rather then trying to figure out why it had failed, and continued the approach to an uneventfull landing. After landing it turned out the left main fuel tank as dry. When I had taken off the mains were at 1/4 and the aux tanks were full. As soon as I leveled off I switched to the aux tanks and remembered that the fuel selector felt "odd" . When I did my descent checks at the destination and swiched back to the mains and was surprised that the left aux fuel guage stilled showed full but ignored it because the left main stilled showed 1/4. It turned out the selector mechanism cabling had failed and the left side never switched to the aux tank. The engine stopped when the tank ran dry, although the gauge stilled showed the same 1/4 full as it had indicated at takeoff. In retrospect there were signs something was wrong yet I did not clue in. There was plenty of fuel on the right side so I could have kept the engine running with crossfeed. Again a preventable engine failure with pre failure warning signs
So ISTP sorry I could not provide stirring tales of pilot Derring Do..... but I hope I gave folks something to think about
