Ted was a pilot at Northwest Airlink. He and I went through upgrade training together and later he was based in Memphis while I was based in Minneapolis. Ted was a very nice guy. Young, energetic, conscientious. Ted was obviously destined for the major airlines. Or so we thought.
Ted, his co-pilot John Flannigan and their flight attendant Debbie DiMoff, were flying empty from Memphis to Columbus MS to start another day of flying. The weather was clear, a beautiful fall morning in the south. During the short flight they got in to talking and John mentioned that he had never seen a propeller actually stopped and feathered in flight. Ted was more than happy to rectify that. He proceeded to shut down the left engine and feather the propeller. From his vantage point in the right seat, John couldn't see the left engine so he climbed out and went in the back to look out the cabin window. As he and Debbie were checking out the stopped propeller, Ted decided to restart the engine. Doing so he followed all the procedures correctly for starting an engine on the ground. Unfortunately, starting the engine in flight was a slightly different procedure. As the engine came to life with the throttle in ground idle, he suddenly discovered something he had probably heard in ground school but didn't pay enough attention too. That is, there is no overspeed governor when in ground idle. So as the prop came up to speed while going 160 knots, the prop did what it wanted to: it ran to an incredibly high overspeed condition. This created a tremendous amount of torque, which caused the plane to roll to the right dramatically, to the tune of almost completely upside down. The overspeed and over torque condition finally hit the Hail Mary engine protection switch and it promptly shut down the engine. Forever. Now the airplane is in anything but controlled flight, and a fair amount of negative g's were created as they hung upside down and started to fall away. John and Debbie meanwhile are now on the ceiling, grabbing for anything they could grab on to- cabinet, a seat back, each other. At this point, the right engine, due to the negative g forces, starved for fuel and quit also. So here is Ted, alone in the cockpit, upside down, his crew on the ceiling in the cabin, flight bags emptying everything all about the cockpit, with two dead engines over the great state of Mississippi.Yes, an excellent adventure it was!
Ted managed to get it upright again, even got the right engine running again but the left engine was toast. On the way back to Memphis they tried to get their story straight, but it just wasn't happening. I imagine Ted trying to explain this to the chief pilot on the ground outside the airplane, babbling like Ralph Kramden caught in a lie- "Humina humina humina..." Took the chief pilot about ten minutes to fire them both. Ted appealed it through the union, but the day before it went to System Board he called and dropped it. Seems his father was quite wealthy, owned a Learjet, so we assumed Ted went back to fly for dear old Dad. Sometimes you have a great story for all the wrong reasons.
