Re-published here by permission of the author.
Safety is a tough sell.
Ask anyone who manufactures or markets fire extinguishers, survival equipment, first-aid kits, life jackets, and so forth. One such salesman lamented to me about how pilots spend thousands on new avionics and other gadgets, but seldom equip themselves or their aircraft with inexpensive safety items that could save their lives. I found this difficult to believe, until we tallied the results of an informal survey taken at my local airport a few years ago. The salesman and I spent three hours interviewing 37 pilots found preflighting their aircraft. The salesman proved his point and claimed that although our informal survey might not have been statistically valid, experience told him that our results were not unusual.