As a private pilot, small a/c flying is as safe as you make it. As much as pilots understand the concepts, they tend to fall back to baser instincts when an engine goes bad at the worst time.
Right, this is where the experience comes in I imagine, and the requirement for X amount of flight hours for Y job. It's not about how easy it is to fly in nominal conditions, but rather how those one in a thousand or million events get handled, in between the hours of "tedium".
My father was a flight instructor for the Air Force in the 1950s. He said the most common causes of accidents were running out of fuel, flying into bad weather, and failing to warm up the engine before takeoff.
> As the single-engine Marchetti climbed during takeoff, the engine suddenly quit.
That's the symptom of failing to warm up the engine properly - it quits just after leaving the ground.
Had fuel, wrong tank. Not enough altitude to try to make it back to a runway. One reason why I appreciate my glider rating - we always know where/when we're going if our engine (tow plane or winch) stops.
Or those who are flying in poor weather ('marginal VFR').
So many accidents read as the pilot really shouldn't have, but did anyway.
These can be greatly mitigated by ensuring that pilots stay current, for instance the clubs I belong to demand 6 monthly re-testing, rather than 2 years the license demands. Not to mention, if you don't fly for 4 weeks, you have to pass a mini re-test. In my clubs long history they have never lost a club plane or pilot.