The day you take off with no nerves at all you will start becoming dangerous.
I get your drift, but I don't think that being nervous is a useful procedure for safety. Far better is to be prepared
- apply top-class maintenance and pro-actively manage the people that do it, avoiding the cowboys (possible only if you are an owner)
- follow procedures / checklists
- understand the aircraft systems
- keep escape routes open (e.g. carrying a raft when over water) at all times
Then you can fly without being nervous.
Re the AOPA mentor scheme, I don't understand why they made it so complicated. I spoke to Haywards Aviation insurance about this and (
they had not apparently been contacted by AOPA UK over it) they cannot see why there should be a liability issue purely as a result of a passenger being carried who is better qualified than the PIC - so long as the LHS is always the PIC.
My suspicion, which won't sound too charitable to AOPA, is that AOPA tried to get too involved in it (and a cynical person might observe that by requiring both pilots to be paid-up AOPA members they are using this as a membership generator for AOPA) and as a result they have created a climate whereby AOPA could be liable (rather than the mentor, for whose liability I am sure there is no legal precedent
provided that the mentor is not an instructor) because they are acting as an "introducer" of the mentor.
There is some precedent from the USA whereby a passenger who just happened to be an instructor (FAA CFI/CFII) was held up following some accidents. But I think very few mentors will be instructors, not least because they would get into trouble with their school for undermining revenue generation.
I think, given typical airfield polics, there would be plenty of scenarios where a very overt mentor is going to get some stick from the mentee's flying school who will see it as usurping their instructors' authority and undermining opportunities for extracting additional funds from the mentee. The mentor probably will not have any connection with that school, but for example his own hangarage may be a bit delicate... always got to watch your 6 o'clock
I do some mentoring but always in my plane, always with the other chap in the RHS, always with me being the PIC, plus I help out with ground school/preflight stuff and that is almost the bigger benefit. And the stuff I have so far done was pre-PPL so no school was potentially involved.