Safety is a way of thinking, it only takes a little more effort. Most unsafe acts revolve around saving money or time, they are gambles, bets that we make betting our health and welfare against a gain in money or time. Most activities are quite tolerant of losses collecting their odds in cash or a bit of blood and pain, sometimes we even insure against these lost bets. Aviation is is not so tolerant, aviation plays full stakes for your life with every hand.
Safety is about being in the state of mind where you analyze everything going on for what could go wrong. Yes, there are various lists of known hazards, fuel in the tanks being probably the biggest, VFR into IMC has to be a close second (the thing to note in this statistic is that a high percentage of these pilots were instrument rated). There is CFIT for a wide variety of reasons and there is loss of control. Then there are maintenance issues....
Thing to remember is that bad safety decisions are very often a result of the statement "I can't afford..." Be it time or money, if that factored heavily into your decision making process, you probably made the lesser safe choice. If that is the reality of the situation, then you shouldn't make that flight. That is not how humans operate though, we gamble. We weigh risks against rewards and accept the odds that we may lose if those odds are long enough, and we perform risk management in order to stretch the odds yet further. If we can stretch the odds beyond the general probability of dying on any given day, it is what I call a "safe bet".
So, the key to safety is being able to recognize risk, and then figuring out how to operationally mitigate that risk, then honestly assessing your current condition for being able to meet that operational burden.
There are four factors involved in every flight situation. Nature, the machine, you, fate. You can't control nature, understand that Mother Nature is feeling bloated with humans and would like to purge you from her gut and turn your body back into fertilizer. She will turn on you with unforecast nastiness.
The machine you have limited control over. Eventually most pilots decide to mitigate on this end of the risk by taking some kind of ownership stake to have greater, or ultimate, control of condition, equipment, and maintenance. There is a reason people buy SVT Glass panels, it is a great source of a lot of information instantly with no interpretation required, that is a huge risk mitigation device. There is a reason people buy FIKI, it is a major risk mitigation in weather. There is a reason people fly twins, it is a great risk mitigator in mechanical failure. They all cost money. Can you afford to mitigate that risk through technology?
The you part, that gets even more complex, there are physiological and psychological factors that are in an everlasting state of flux. A bad decision to operate under high levels of fatigue bit me in the ass last summer with a gear up. I didn't really consider the fatigue factor because the schedule I had been keeping is no different from my normal 'underway' schedule, except I did a day of labor prior in the Atlanta heat and waxed my plane. Most of the time anymore my deckhands do the waxing.
Also my circadian clock was still on Central European time, so I am landing at 1am circadian time.
I failed to factor all of these things together before the flight, I was on vacation and wanted to get to OSH. I couldn't afford the time, one of the classic traps, and it cost me an airplane.
We take risks because we leave most of our lives to the fourth factor, fate. I am probably more prone to this than most as there have been quite a few moments of realization in my life where when everything finally stopped, I wondered "How in the **** did I survive that?"
When I operate solo, which is most of the time, I am quite prone to pushing on, therefore when I take passengers, I install an extra line of consideration to protect against it having too much sway.
There are basically 6 links to any accident chain, accidents very rarely happen due to one, or the culmination of two, factors. One of the skills of risk mitigation is observation. You have to observe issues that could be a problem. You then have to consider them in the entire context. You have to recognize the links as they are forged, and watch for signs that two links are getting connected by a third starting your chain. Sometimes you take off with two or three links already forged with SE night in low IMC. You may have yet another you don't know about built into the plane by a mechanic. At these times you have to be very vigilant not to let any more links forge onto the chain. You can't add any mistakes.
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