however it is a fact that a well maintained aeroplane engine very rarely fails.
That is true.
However they do fail, sometimes over water.
One day I was talking to a ferry pilot in Wick Scotland where we were waiting for weather for the North Atlantic crossing.
He was flying a Cessna 172 and I asked him if he was worried about flying over all that water in a single engine 172, he said he had been ferrying single engine airplanes across the Northern Atlantic route for a long time and he had no worries because they never quit.
Some time later I tried to contact him and one of his friends told me he had gone missing in a Cessna 172 between Iceland and Greenland.
I gotta do it when I want to visit friends who live on islands Chuck...
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As you know I live on Vancouver Island, and when I used to fly single engine to the mainland if I could not climb high enough to make land I did not go.
I am well aware that it is all about risk assessment and I am only expressing my thoughts on it.
Lets look at it another way.
We all have the right to accept a given risk based on our own limits of risk taking, lets say you are flying xx miles beyond land in your single engine airplane and are willing to take that risk based on your rights to decide what you do.
Would you still go if you had three underage childeren with you that are not old enough to decide for them self?