As we've been traveling around by small plane for our American Futures reports in the past 18 months, one of our guiding policies has been No Difficult Flying. Takeoffs and landings during daylight hours only. Keep up instrument-flight proficiency, but avoid having to fly in "actual instrument conditions," which means through clouds or when ceilings are low. Find comfortable-sized runways rather than tricky smaller ones. When in doubt, wait until the next day.
People who fly light airplanes rationalize away the inherent riskiness of the activity. People who don't know about aviation often do not realize how many large categories of risk turn on the decision whether to make a flight at all, rather than on anything you do or don't do once aloft.
More than a year ago, we faced one of these decisions when I was supposed to take the Marketplace radio team back from Eastport, Maine to the commercial airport in Portland. It would have been less than a one-hour flight by Cirrus SR-22, versus nearly a five-hour drive. But the weather was bad and worsening; on takeoff from Eastport we would have had to fly for some time before making radio contact with the nearest air-traffic controllers, in Bangor; and I didn't have good answers to various "well, what if this happens... " questions. So the plane stayed on the ground, and they made the long drive.
My wife Deb and I had another such moment yesterday. We were flying from the Phoenix area to Ajo, Arizona, a small ex-mining town trying to re-invent itself as an arts and nature travel destination, about which you'll hear more. Ajo has a small airport, which is unusual in being almost entirely surrounded by various forms of "Restricted" airspace. The most restricted of these, to the city's north, is known as R-2305, the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range, where A-10s, F-16s, and other aircraft conduct day-and-night bombing and strafing drills.