I will point out one VERY clear and distinguishing point:
This thread is about FLYING AN AIRCRAFT. Every single person who has come into this thread and HAS flown a plane, and IS at LEAST a licensed pilot, has said this is unsafe and foolish behavior. The ONLY people who say this is a fun, great idea, are the people who have never been there.
A little example of how things can go very badly. I recently "earned" my wings. That is to say, after having my license and having flown for years, I underwent that singular experience in which you discover whether or not you have what it takes to become a pilot.
My background: I am a licensed pilot. I have flown everything from Gliders, to Helicopters, to single engine prop planes, and have formal training for IFR flight using a full-motion US Navy P-3 simulator. My specialties however lie in gliders and light prop aircraft. I started flying when I was 13, and have received formal training from private instructors in gliders, a US Navy instructor in the P-3 Sim, and both Embry Riddle and USAF instructors in Cessnas. After all this training, I am no expert, but I am leaps and bounds ahead of this guy.
I was recently flying my own personal aircraft, a small single engine aircraft that straddles the line between Single Engine Power and Light Sport, on a perfectly clear, calm day. I took off from my home field at Dillingham Airfield, made the 30 minute flight to Honolulu International Airport with my father in the right seat. I followed all of my check-lists, and made a text-book approach as per my training. On the turn from base to final, at about 600ft AGL and midway through my bank, the nose started to drop, and the plane began to roll into the turn. No big deal, just a small gust of wind. I went to make a slight correction on the stick, and found the stick would not move. The nose got lower, and I was headed at the ground while banked. Rudders responded fine, but the stick had absolutely no motion in any direction. Long story short, after a few miliseconds of panic, I collected my wits about me and evaluated the situation. Finally, I realized my father's sunglasses had fallen, and wedged into the well the stick rests in on his side of the aircraft. Well, once the stick was cleared I had a new problem. I was just a hundred feet or so off the ground, with far too much speed due to my dive, and constrained to land on that pass, with traffic running parallel to me on 4R, and traffic at an angle to me on 8L. Whats more, I had to land and hold short before the intersection with 8L in an aircraft notorious for floating. So, with little altitude, WAY too much speed, and not nearly as much runway space to land as I would have liked, I had to use every trick in the book, and fly that fuzzy line between control and stall, in order to shed enough speed to get my gear on the ground. Brakes squeezed, I rolled to a stop mere feet from the Hold Short line at the intersection with 8R, out of breath, shaken, and not anxious to get into the air again.
My point? Even with all the formal instruction I can get, with more experience than most private pilots in a wider variety of aircraft and flying conditions, I still straddled the line between life and death so very nearly I actually thanked a god I didn't believe in when I got both feet on solid ground. And this all happened due to a minor issue with a pair of sunglasses. If I had not had a formal instruction teaching me TECHNIQUES such as crabbing and cross control, if I had not had someone there to monitor the stick during practice with incipient stalls, slow speed flight, and short field landings, I may have suffered a runway incursion, simply crashed before landing, or even worse, caused a collision with the commercial jet on 8R.
There is a LOT more to go wrong in aviation than most people, pilots included, tend to take into account. This is an over-simplification, but I have learned one thing when it comes to flying: Flying from point A to point B can be done by a trained monkey. But when something goes wrong, it goes wrong faster, and farther, than in any other situation in the world. Without formal instruction, this man may well be dead the first time a gust of wind catches him on final approach. God forbid he should have succeeded enough times previously to have found it a good idea to take someone else up with him...
Also, since we like to reference the Wright Brothers a lot here, yes, they survived and excelled. Do you have the statistics for how many before and after them DIDN'T?
(For anyone interested in a little evidence of my story, my father happened to be video taping the approach. While the recovery and landing were cut off, you can see the first few seconds of the control lock, and hear me recognize the issue with the glasses via this youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17RqlhH72gc)
