It seems to me (a fairly high time Mooney driver) that most GA airplanes end up
bent, not worn out. The arguement here, and the question I answer in the
affermative every time I take the runway for takeoff, is that I'm willing to
roll the die one more time. I've assumed my particular die has a couple of
thousand white faces, and only one black one. Having said that, the black face
has come fairly close to the top a few times, and I consider myself (don't we
all) a careful pilot.

At about 400 hours tt I was flying a Ranger (normal carberated Mooney) IFR,
started an approach, pulled on the carb heat, and the damned carb heat cable
broke. Tried everything to get power -- gear, landing light, flaps, everything.
Turned out if I leaned the engine it ran well enough for me to fly the miss and
struggle to my alternate. Yes, it was IMC, night, and an approach into an
uncontolled airport. One might argue one shouldn't attempt VOR approaches under
those circumstances, but hell, the airports nearby were reporting conditions
fairly well above my personal minimums.

I've had an alternator failure in soft IFR, a vacuum pump fail in similiar
circumstances. It wouldn't have taken much for one other minor error or
condition to have turned what might be considered 'trained for' emergencies
into something the NTSB would have written about.

What about you guys? I suspect if your log book has more than a few hundard
hours you've been in circumstances where your particular die's black face
nearly came up. Was the start of the sequence 'pilot error' or equipment?

I've figured the Mooney lies somewhere between bike and car as a safe means of
transportation. Aren't bikes about 10 X the risk of a car on a per mile basis,
and GA about 3 X (after excluding drunk pilots and those who run out of gas,
those kinds of what most of us would call avoidable errors)?