This Everything2 post The most engine failures in one flight has some great quotables:
More than one airliner has been lost because engines literally fell off, and the pilots' report to ATC that they had "lost" said engines was interpreted merely as them failing, since the vernacular is, rather inconveniently, the same.
Also good:
...passengers going to the toilet caused an engine to fall off at least three Boeing 727s in flight, and caused an engine shutdown on two others. In all cases the blame was laid on> ice accumulating around a service panel on the fuselage near the drain outlet for the cabin lavatory. The ice broke away in-flight and was ingested by one of the engines, which on the 727 are all at the rear.
Incidentally, Everything2 is a bastion of knowledge- it was hacker's wikipedia long before there was wikipedia.
