Flying is one of those things that gets safer the more of it you do right up until the point the opposite is true. It is a well-known fact that low-time pilots -- those with only a few hours at the controls of an aircraft -- suffer more accidents than high-time pilots.

Less recognized is the point at the other end of the spectrum where flying also becomes more dangerous.

Seventy-nine-year-old Alaskan John Graybill flew his Super Cub "into terrain,'' as pilots say, northeast of McGrath and died along with his wife, Dolly. Graybill had thousands of hours at the controls of a Cub. A friend of mine, a pilot who grew up in Anchorage and who is now middle aged, remembers as a kid knowing Graybill, and said even then everyone said the man was a first-rate pilot.

After Graybill's death, one of his daughters called him "the finest Super Cub pilot in the world." Some number of others, some of them professional pilots, agreed. They credited Graybill, a notorious poacher, with extraordinary skills at the stick and rudder.

And yet he is dead. One has to wonder if his skills might have been what tempted him to push on into bad weather after the guy flying behind him in another aircraft radioed he was turning back because of his fears about the conditions.

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association's Air Safety Foundation probed this issue of experience and risk in a 1995 study that looked at, among other things, a certain kind of deadly storm -- the thunderstorm.

Bruce Landsberg, executive director of the Air Safety Foundation, later wrote in summarizing the data:

Every pilot has a fascination with thunderstorms, and at least 200 pilots got too close to cumulonimbus. Sixty percent of these accidents occurred in cruise flight and, not surprisingly, during the summer months. Familiarity does seem to breed contempt, because the largest category of pilots (killed) had more than 1,000 hours total flight time. What the accident investigations don't tell is how many times the pilot had pulled the tiger's tail before getting mauled.

The next largest category involves relatively low-time pilots with between 100 and 500 hours total time. Perhaps a slightly mangled cliche applies: What you don't know certainly can hurt you. Our bet is that these pilots were just starting to stretch their cross-country wings and failed to understand the danger. When only three percent of weather accidents involve thunderstorms, we can feel reasonably certain that only a few brave and ignorant souls are trespassing on Thor's turf.

Thor -- the hammer wielding Norse God of thunder and weather -- pretty clearly killed Graybill, and probably played a role as well in the high-profile crash earlier in the month of a GCI Otter flown by Terry Smith, a former chief pilot for Alaska Airlines.

That was the crash that killed former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. Smith was a pilot with more than 10,000 hours at the controls and a reputation as an advocate for air safety in the 49th state.

The National Transportation Safety Board is still trying to sort out what happened in the Otter crash which left four survivors and five dead, including Stevens. But Rick Halford, who was flying in the Dillingham area of the crash at the time Smith's plane went down, suspects weather.

Halford is a veteran pilot, a big-game guide, a former state senator, and an old sidekick of late Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond, who flew his own single-engine plane around the state for 50 years before dying of natural causes at the age of 83. Halford believes Smith might have flown into the clouds and then into a mountain hidden in the clouds.