well said Willie. Given Arthur’s response, the word you may be looking for is not conservative, but something simpler.
Being a conservative is more about the amount of risk one is willing to accept or apply to a given situation be it social, activity, or technically related. IE, a conservative pilot would be one that set’s higher limits on weather, add a little more fuel, takes a longer route because it would be safer. A social conservative would question spending amounts, ask if some programs are needed, challenge risky laws. There may be many conservative pilots (I certainly was one), but there are a subset that can be grouped under a different title that is less complementary.
Bad guys hire a plane/pilot to fly them somewhere and pilot makes bad decisions is about all I got from this article. Why he made those choices he took to his death, but I can agree that a PA140 with 4 males was on the back side of any performance curve and one small mistake would upset the cart, which it did.