Chuck Yeager was a very skilled pilot with inhumanly good vision and ridiculously good luck. He's also a good demonstration of survivorship bias.

If you think you have the skill and luck of Chuck Yeager, by all means, go fly boldly.

One of my old coworkers was a retired navy captain who used to be an instructor at Top Gun and had hundreds of night carrier landings. He told me that he'd have to be forced at gunpoint to fly on a small general aviation airplane, it's just too dangerous.

>One of my old coworkers was a retired navy captain who used to be an instructor at Top Gun and had hundreds of night carrier landings. He told me that he'd have to be forced at gunpoint to fly on a small general aviation airplane, it's just too dangerous.

it's just not that simple.

Some of the smallest GA craft are the safest by the numbers until you group them into the same category as famously sophisticated or hard to maintain models.

if it were me i'd be worried about the bigger GA planes. More to go wrong, more to distract the pilot, more reliance on the pilot being able to manage multiple engines and special equipment, more difficult take-offs, etc.

Maybe their dad only started saying this in the past three decades

Being a test pilot is a whole different thing. It is all about calculated risk. Those calculations are done by teams of engineers and not just the pilot themselves.

Calculated risk? Nah those guys are gloriously insane. They do minimize risks, but they also go into the air wright-bro-style except instead of a glider that will go 200m they're strapped to two experimental jets in an airframe that was welded, not pressed ^^

I am not saying that test pilots are not brave. They certainly are. However, they are brave + skilled + practice + smart + can perform under stress.

This is a slightly stretched analogy, but test pilots make me think of Alex Hannold. In the movie Free Solo he is presented as some insane person... it turns out that he is extremely intelligent + practices a lot + can perform under stress.

In both cases, these are the best of us. However, being brave/nuts is the elementary school version of understanding what it takes to be these people.