Comment by chrissnell

My dad has his license and used to fly all the time. I told him I was interested in doing it, too, now that I have the money and he basically said, "Hell no, don't do it." His reasoning is that general aviation crashes are often fatal because you have very little time to react in the event of a problem and most private pilots simply don't have sufficient hours to have the muscle memory and awareness to react appropriately in an instant. He said it takes years of flying before you are a safe enough pilot to, say, bring your family along. He told me to search the news around Christmastime every year and that you'll see a family of four that died in a crash. Pilots get overeager to just get someplace and take risks and then their number comes up and they can't respond to it quickly enough.