Question, I don’t like to fly much and I have a flight Feb. 7 from Seattle to Maui. How do planes handle an emergency flying over the water most of the way and how experienced are the Pilots on the 767’s? I just need a little reassurance I guess that they know what they are doing and won’t make “pilot errors” that I’ve heard about (Air France etc…)
The pilots are highly skilled.
The chances of having an emergency on this route is nearly nil. On the flight to Hawaii, the airplane will return to the mainland if an emergency happens prior to the halfway point. Otherwise, it will continue on to Hawaii. Note that the halfway point is not necessarily the halfway point in miles. Rather, its the halfway point in time.
The mainland/Hawaii route is one of the safest in the United States. A Pan Am Boeing 377 ditched in 1955. That was the last time an airliner went down between Hawaii and the mainland.
Aloha!
There was this flight in 1957 but it was not a regularly scheduled flight:
Try to remember that the pilots have no interest in having their lives come to an end prematurely. 
www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
These numbers are just the crashes: the number of deaths is higher…
Motor Vehicle Traffic Crashes
2009 2008 2007 2006
Fatal Crashes 30,797 34,172 37,435 38,648
Particularly when driving from Seattle to Honolulu.
Not if you use the right car:
That is correct. All ETOPS certified pilots know what to do when it comes to an engine failure or something similar.