Jay Honeck wrote:
Except for the line about flying over the lake without a life
jacket, what about scary parts like icing encounter, electrical
failures, equipment malfunction, icy runways, extreme crosswinds,
severe turbulence, etc.?

Well, Hai, there have been a few of those.

- The time we lost the #2 cylinder coming out of Titusville, FL, thanks to
lead fouling. Had to come around and land with a very rough engine.
- The complete electrical failure in a clapped out rental Cherokee 140, at
night...
- The sudden encounter with icing while flying right seat with Mary as
PIC...
- The near-collision with a Stinson in the pattern over Iowa City...
- Landing, at night, on a 2300' x 30' wide strip, with mayonnaise-jar lights
on just one side of the runway, and snow drifts all around...
- The inadvertent retraction of flaps on take-off in a 172, and the near
collision with traffic as the plane settled back toward the earth...
- The severe turbulence coming into Oelwein, IA that very nearly convinced
Mary never to fly again...
- The time we drained over a quart of water from the tanks of a rental
plane...
- The time the throttle cable broke, thankfully while taxiing out to the
runway...(rentals, again)

Come to think of it, most of the scary stuff (other than the bills we
occasionally receive!) went away when we stopped renting. Some of the
rental fleet is pretty frightening!

:-)

I WAS going to suggest you go buy a lottery ticket but by the sound of
it you don't need it :-)
My 'scary' was a series of engine failures in a (again) rental
microlite........