I recently traveled from outside Boston to Groton, CT-a popular trip in these parts, thanks to a nearby casino-and then on to Cape Cod, before returning home. It's about a five-hour drive, if the traffic isn't too bad. I did it in a little over two hours, by flying. Not a commercial flight: just driving to Boston's Logan Airport, checking in and boarding takes two hours. I flew myself in a rented Cessna, for a total cost of $160-a cost I could have split up to four ways if I had gone with friends. Besides being quick and relatively cheap, the trip afforded stunning panoramas of explosively colored fall foliage and ragged shoreline inaccessible from the earthbound perspective of a car or through the plastic peephole of a 747.

That's the good news about flying a small plane. Here's the bad news: before the flight, I had to pore over charts and airport directories, compile lists of radio navigation aids, digest a long weather briefing, and calculate wind correction angles and fuel consumption figures. Throughout the flight I had to engage in streams of aviationspeak ("Cessna one-eight-hotel, report left base following Warrior, confirm you have traffic in sight, winds three-three-zero at nine") and actively monitor eight gauges.

To land, I had to adjust carburetor heat, lower wing flaps, and turn the plane askew to compensate for crosswind, among other tasks, all while remembering that an omission or error could have been fatal-the sort of error that plays a role in a third of the 700-odd non-commercial aircraft deaths that occur each year. And this was in clear skies; flying in clouds brings a quantum jump in complexity.

No wonder a mere 26,000 people or so earn pilot's licenses each year, compared to some four million who get driver's licenses. And this despite the fact that our increasingly mobile population is choking on clogged roadways and an often near-gridlocked commercial airline system-while the runways at some 4,500 small public airports mostly sit empty.