To answer a few points:
No, I certainly wasn't alluding to the age of the pilot in question. I was making a more general point that aviation is dangerous, and it's worthwhile taking safety seriously. It always seems slightly unseemly when somebody dies - to be simultaneously aware that a person has lost their life, and to try and learn what one can from it. But I think we should.
I should have been a bit more careful about defining 'work' - you can argue that a screening test that finds untreatable cancers 'works', but the NHS would generally argue that such a test wouldn't be worthwhile.
Another issue is that there isn't just a financial cost of screening tests - many of them find a proportion of false positives, and there are risks to the cascade of further investigations and operations that they spark off. For example, a colonoscopy (for suspected bowel cancer) is a pretty safe procedure, but if you were to do one on everybody in the UK you would kill a few thousand people by causing bowel perforations. If you just pick on people with a family history of bowel cancer, or other 'risk factors', then the equation works out strongly in favour of screening again.
Going back to the topic, if we can have ballistic parachutes, why not flotation devices on the outside of aircraft?