Piston twins are demonized by insurance companies and most general aviation pilots, and Flying magazine is responsible for the situation. Well, we are to blame for calling attention to the potential safety problems with twins, but our information has been misunderstood and certainly misapplied by many involved in general aviation. We have it right, and the insurance companies and most pilots have it wrong.
Dick Collins gets the credit for beginning and sustaining our crusade to inform pilots about the safety aspects of piston twins versus singles. Dick started his work on getting the facts out in the 1960s when the situation was reversed and commonly held attitudes about twins were wrong, but just the opposite of now. Back then the entire industry just knew that a piston twin was absolutely and automatically safer than a single.
So much safety attention in the post World War II era and on into the 1960s and '70s was focused on power loss that more engines was always believed to be safer than fewer in any airplane. Four engines were the norm for airliners, the military flew airplanes with eight or more, and pilots joked that you had enough engines when the copilot could say "number 12 just quit," and the captain could ask "on which side?"
General aviation pilots also bought into the many-engines-equals-safety concept. Nobody who could afford two engines flew with one. And certainly any serious transportation flying, especially at night or under IFR, would be done in a twin by the cautious pilot. Moving up to a twin was something every pilot dreamed of doing.
The belief in engine redundancy was so strong in those days that the insurance companies covered twins for a fraction of the premium charged for a single. Nobody bothered to look at accident statistics; it was so obvious to the industry that the ability to continue flying after loss of an engine was safer than making a forced landing.
But Dick started pointing out in Flying that twins were not safer than singles after either type of airplane lost an engine. His research clearly showed that twins were involved in more fatal accidents after an engine failure than were singles. He wasn't damning the twins, or defending singles, or even trying to cover for the obvious fact that the pilot of a single that loses an engine must survive a forced landing while the pilot of a twin shouldn't need to. He was calling attention to the reality that was different from the belief and demanding that the FAA and the industry do something to address the problem.
When Dick started his work, the safety situation in piston twins was abysmal, particularly in training. For many years the FAA flight test guides said that the VMC single-engine minimum safe airspeed demonstration should not be conducted below 500 feet agl. That seems like such an absurdly low altitude to practice such a critical maneuver that who could imagine such advice would be necessary? But the reality was worse than you can imagine, because flight instructors took the 500-foot advice to mean that VMC practice and demonstrations should be done at that altitude, not higher.
