Jose wrote:
Personal flying
often involves decisions which are made independent of the weather,
making the weather a complicating factor rather than a deciding factor.
But that's even more true of self-flown business flying. There are
lots of pilots who only fly for personal reasons that will only fly
when the weather is nice - making weather a deciding factor. Those who
fly on business rarely do this.

I was including this kind of business flying as "personal flying". Do
the statistics separate it out?

Yes - and it is MUCH safer.

So, anything that rasies the cost of flying, or makes it more difficult
to accomplish a mission by flying, or increases the impact of weather on
flying, or discourages flying, will have a component that adversely
affects safety.
I agree. Thus all safety rules are bad - they do all the above.

Not quite. All (such)safety rules =contain= a bad component. Some of
them contain sufficient good component as to outweigh that.

I'm not convinced that this is ever true. There are two things that
you have to assume about a safety rule to believe the good component
outweighs the bad:

(1) A significant number of people will comply with the rule only
because it is a rule, and not because it is a good idea. Make it
merely advisory, and significant numbers of people will not comply.

(2) The benefit from the above is sufficiently great that the negative
impact on cost, utility, etc. of flying, and the consequent reduction
in proficiency, is offset.

This can really only happen if the people writing the rules are a lot
smarter and/or more knowledgeable about aviation than the people being
forced to comply. I've met a lot of airplane owners, and I've met a
lot of FAA employees. I'm pretty confident that the opposite is true.

However (my
point), some safety rules, though they do contain =some= good component,
contain more bad component and are a net bad.

I can think of plenty of those. I would be interested in a rule you
would consider a net good. Please limit to private aviation only (no
commercial ops) since that's clearly where the worst safety problems
exist.

Michael