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The modern piston-engine airplane is really a technological marvel. For not that much more in fuel than a large SUV, one can operate an airplane in and through most weather conditions, over long distances and with navigational accuracy unheard of just a few years ago. At our fingertips are all kinds of aeronautical data and weather graphics. We have airborne sensors alerting us to thunderstorms and nearby airplanes. With the right equipment, we can send e-mail or make telephone calls, all from the comfort of our left seat.

I continue to be surprised about pilots having accidents while doing maneuvers close to the ground. This list includes airmen from a wide variety of backgrounds, including airshow performers, flight instructors, military pilots and general aviation pilots. It seems to me that some of us have forgotten or misplaced the early-learned information concerning the relationship between Gs and wing stall speed.

Youve been in the clag for what seems like hours. The monochromatic gray outside the windows is broken only by the raindrops streaking up your windscreen and meandering back at a slower pace along your side windows. Youve turned off your strobes, but you can see the reassuring red and green glow of the recognition lights at your wing tips, reflected back from the thick grayness.

The ducks were going to be walking soon. It was sometime in the early 1980s-I had just flown my rented Skyhawk down to the ILS Runway 5R minimums at the Raleigh-Durham (N.C.) International Airport (RDU), breaking out at decision height. Earlier, I missed the 600-foot minimum descent altitude radar approach at the nearby Horace Williams Airport at Chapel Hill, N.C. This was Plan B.

I was painting myself into a corner. Id departed Louisville, Kentucky into a screaming westerly wind bound for Jefferson City, Missouri. Snow and icy clouds threatened to the north, so I steered the Cessna 172 slightly south of a direct course and crossed the Mississippi somewhere north of Cape Girardeau. Now making maybe 70 knots ground speed, I was over heavily forested hills, the few small airports below closed from a recent, heavy snowfall. I started to worry about fuel.

The number of our landings must always equal our takeoffs, or so goes the old adage. But sometimes the safest way to ensure equality is to do neither. Unlike birds possessing the gift of flight and whose skills are instinctive, we have the hard-won gift of thought. We earn our skills through repetition and reason.

Keeping current is one of the downsides of earning the Instrument rating. Even if our flying activity is above-average, logging all of the required maneuvers in actual IMC during six-months of normal operations is next to impossible for many pilots. Thankfully, the FAAs recent-experience rules allow us to simulate instrument conditions even in good VFR as long as we have a safety pilot along.

One of the reasons we fly airplanes is to go fast. I confess: Theres a certain satisfaction from pushing the airplane hard, up into its yellow arc. If youre lucky, you fly something capable of such speeds without much effort, even in the summer or at high altitude, when the air is thinner and indicated airspeeds lower.

Early in our flying careers, we do everything by the book. Watching a flight schools ramp, its not at all uncommon to see a student peering intently back and forth between the airplanes POH and, say, the engine compartment. We check everything during the preflight, even if the tires are still warm from the squawk-free flight just concluded.

One of the fallacies of flying IFR in marginal-to-good weather is that its safe to presume everyone else out there is on the same page, under the watchful eye of ATC. Instead, its completely legal for someone else to be scud-running in barely VFR weather while youve gone to the trouble to get the rating, file the flight plan and follow the clearance.