Cockpit Colin wrote:
Tell you an interesting story about professional pilots ...

I was bumming a ride in the jump seat of a Saab 340A - the reason I was
there was because I wasn't prepared to fly a light twin with a single-engine
service ceiling of around 4250 at night over terrain that requires a MSA of
around 8000 feet.

Without any suggestion from me, 2 seperate crews immediately came to the
same conclusion I did - and that is "if you were going to do that flight
then you would want to track around the coast" (ie at sea level).

In my opinion these crews both have a safety oriented attitude - on the
other hand many of the pilots I know would do that flight at night in a
single - their best attempt at "risk management" being "the aeroplane
doesn't know it's night"

If safety was your ultimate goal, you would only fly the airlines and
not fly GA at all, other than bizjets whose record rivals the airlines.
The safest GA aircraft are still much more dangerous than the airlines.

People talk about safety like it is an absolute and it simply isn't. It
depends on the circumstances. The example I use is people who say they
would never take off in 0/0 conditions even though it is legal under
part 91. I wouldn't normally do this either, but if my wife needed
emergency surgery and was fairly certain to die without it, and if my
airplane was the only means to get her to a hospital, then I'd take off
0/0 to make such a flight. In that case, the relatively small risk of
killing us both outweights the very high risk of death without the surgery.

Matt