Actually and speaking as an ex-Rolls-Royce aircraft engine engineer,No matter what Gord believed had happenned , it is excedingly rare to find instances of "the engines falling off the planes",
Sure in the early days of Boeing 707s, DC8's and Convair 990s the initial designs of the engine mounting pylons may have been too weak (the pylons are in fact designed to break at a certain excessive load anyway to avoid tearing the wings off)
I have just googled for "engine fell off aeroplane" and amongst the 4 milion results I found yet another interesting and relevant article on the BBC site regarding an incident in 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1652772.stm
although this actually refers to the New York crash of an Airbus 300 when in fact the vertical fin and rudder broke off
flight 587's fin
and a Rolls-Royce Conway did apparently fall off a BOAC Boeing 707 in 1962 see:-
http://aviation-safety.net/database/...0408-0&lang=en
and American airlines Flight 191 crashed on May 25 1979
in the deadliest acccident on US soil until 9/11
Flight 191, its No. 1 engine severed on the runway,
in an unrecoverable bank just moments
before the crash.
but I expect the incidents Gord suffered were much more likely to have been purely an engine failure or an abnormal instrument reading before take off requiring an engine change, Fortuneately engine failures and problems have greatly diminished since those days