Well, there was this time when I was two and I was sitting on the pilot's lap....

I've spent a lot of time as a passenger in small planes and I have a good idea of what's involved in a preflight. I'm not against safety in general, but I think lawsuits and government oversight have really held back general aviation. A plane should be more reliable and therefore expensive than a car with a similar level of sophistication, but it doesn't need to cost 15 times as much.

Edit: based on khafra's comment, a possible reading of my earlier comment is that it's no more complicated to fly a plane than drive a car. I intended to say that it's no more complicated to build a single-engine propeller-driven airplane than to build a car.