Chuck, SN3 - Guys you are entitled to your own opinion about flying night, IMC etc in single engine aircraft, that is your call. But we don't need the judgmental postings to go with it.
And I don't need your snotty judgmental opinion about how I make decisions.
All flying is about personal risk assessment and risk mitigation. Every flight has an amount of risk and we do our best to offset those risks through training and preparation.
Exactly, and all the training in the world won't help you if you have an engine failure over very cold water beyond gliding distance from land, or in IMC with a low ceiling.....or at night with no ground reference therefore not exposing ones self to these conditions is in my opinion good airmanship.
I am perfectly happy to fly SEP as described, but I am careful to apply my own mitigating factors before I conduct the flight just as many others are.
Think about this for a while::
I was talking to another ferry pilot in Wick while holding for weather on my last Atlantic ferry flight he was delivering a single engine airplane to North America.
I asked him if he was concerned about only having one engine and he said not at all.
I received an e-mail a few months later telling me that he had just disappeared on his last ferry flight over the North Atlantic' I often think about how indifferent he was to the risk factor when we were talking.