I flew an old, poorly maintained ex RAF trainer from Gatwick to Sharjah, a long time ago. This involved several over water legs, the Channel, Nice to Rome, Brindisi to Athens, Athens to Rhodes, Rhodes to Cyprus, Kuwait to Bahrain. The engine stopped once, while climbing through cloud over the Italian mountains (damp magnetos). Luckily the tired, time-expired Gipsy Queen kept chugging along while I was over water, prepared as I was for ditching with an loaned RAF life-jacket, 10 miniflares and a VHF of limited power. The engine eventually caught fire on take-off from Baghdad, due to a maintenance error before I left.
I was at the age when you just don't think of the risks, and rightly so. I had 110 hours in my log, total, when I left, so I knew all I needed to know. My test-pilot uncle, who had form after crashing the prototype and only Vickers Windsor in 1943, said that of all the stupid things I had done, that was the most stupid (which was saying a lot), and he was right.
But I lived to tell the tale, and so will you, Mr OP, probably; so go for it is my advice, and expand your horizons. Nothing is quite as dangerous as it appears to the terminally cautious. The probability of a normally maintained and operated piston aircraft engine failing without warning is infinitessimal unless you mis-manage it or your fuel; how often has your mass-produced, poorly constructed car engine just stopped for no reason half-way through a trip? Never? Thought so.
You are a lot safer in your SEP doing 200 miles over water than you would be sitting down the back of a nice big ETOPS aircraft which has just had an engine shutdown, and is starting a 420 minute single-engine diversion across the Southern Ocean with the crew hoping like hell that the other one holds up. Or even a 330 minute diversion. IMHO, of course.
PS; I admit I had some undeserved luck as well. When the engine stopped over Italy, instead of gliding into a mountain, deadstick, before coming out of the cloud, as I reckoned I was about to do, I came out of the bottom of the cloud, and there 800 ft below was an air force base so secret it wasn't on the map, with a nice long runway. That's when my T21 training at Lasham proved useful.
Last edited by old,not bold; 24th Mar 2016 at 23:39.