Another way to think of this is that there is an abundance of pilots who are say 55 or 60 years old... Many of them have been flying for 30 years and even longer if you include military service.
Imagine waking up every day and flying a plane for 6-8 hours... now it is a bit more complicated then that but you get the point... You wake up and go work at the bank, shop, etc... They go work in the cockpit.
Many have families, are college graduates, & extremley smart but for some reason choose to fly airplanes even though they might be able to get a job in another industry that would pay them more money... This is not because they like the dangerous job of being a pilot but just the opposite..The enjoy being a polot and understand how reliable planes really are.. They have been through the courses and understand just how hard it is to make a plane "fall" out of the sky...
If you think for 1 minute a pilot does not think flying is one of the safest forms of transportation you are just fooling yourself.
Now, regarding maintenance, etc.. Look at it this way... Pick the part of the world with the worst maintenance for commercial planes (africa maybe?) and then ask yourself how many times you hear about planes crashing, is it daily, weekly, monthly, yearly? Take thier standards and multiply that by 1,000's and you have most modern countries standards..