I'm not a pilot, but if I were I'd have a marine band radio and maintain a listening watch on channel 16 when over water.

Most of the GA pilots I've known carry an air band HT as a backup to the onboard radio systems. Marine band is FM and air band is AM, so unfortunately it would probably be too expensive for a company to produce an air band HT with marine channel 16 on it.

One of my amateur radio HTs has wideband receive and can hear all of that traffic, but the wideband transmit mod won't let it transmit in AM.

A note on the law: it's legal for hams to modify their equipment as long as they do not transmit illegally. For myself, I do not mod my ham gear to be able to transmit outside of established ham bands. Ham radios are not type accepted for other services, so even though I have a GMRS license, if I were to transmit on GMRS frequencies with ham gear, that would be illegal.