"doctor killer" aircraft

For me the classical “doctor killer” is the Piper Malibu. I wouldn’t have associated the Bonanza with that term. But they are very similar aircraft in terms of complexity and performance so I guess the term applies to both equally well. After all, they earned this designation by just doing what it says. An over-proportionally high number of pilots who were killed in accidents with this category of aeroplanes were doctors.

Having trained quite a few and being one myself (but not in medicine) I would tend toward “academic/professional arrogance” as the main cause. People who have mastered something as difficult as an academic degree tend to think that everything else in life is trivial and does not require much attention and preparation. But complex aircraft operated in difficult circumstances (weather/tight schedules) do require a fair amount of attention and preparation. And being able to tell the difference between a sunburn and skin cancer does not necessarily mean that one can tell the difference between a thunderstorm and a gentle rain shower on a weather radar display.

It is a historical anacronism where doctors used to be the best paid professionals and so bought high performance aircraft. It was the Bonanza, then the PA46 and then Cirrus is the modern equivalent but the parachute usually stops them being kiled. In general it is a form of jealousy IMHO. Higher performance aircraft accessible to PPLs are easy to stereotype.

No such thing as a refresher course. And not needed, because the knowledge doesn’t deprecate that fast.

I once took 8 months off to complete my PhD and I’m afraid your experience didn’t match mine. It took a fair while to come back up to speed.

In medicine, doctors are generally expected to remember practically everything they learned for years or even decades maybe.

True, but in practice they can’t – with perhaps a very few exceptions who go on to be professors and ostentatiously address people who ask questions after lectures by name despite there being 300 people in a medical-school year. The problem is that they then get to set medical curricula, which are designed on the assumption that other people think the same way that they do – which for the most part they don’t. Medicine suffers greatly from the cult of memory in my view. If pilots were trained like doctors, they’d be expected to memorise approach plates and there’d be great holes all over Europe. My conflict of interest here is that I have a bad memory.

Personally I’ve always put the reputation down to the fact that doctors were 1) wealthy enough to buy the things and 2) didn’t have enough free time to stay current. But you make some other thoughtful points as well. I think that it was Langewiesche who said that being a good pilot has a lot to do with being a good person – a strikingly odd statement which I think probably has a grain of truth in it. I took it as referring to attributes such as patience, conscientiousness and humility… A lot of the adjectives that one might use to describe a ‘good’ person might also describe characteristics desirable in a pilot. Unfortunately studying medicine can screw people up royally – though thankfully this is far from universally the case.

MedEwok wrote:

But I also found the term to be used in a broader way, refering to any GA aircraft that is

somewhat expensive, so high-earning professionals (such as doctors) are likely buyers (because they can afford it)
has a comparatively high performance (fast, slippery)
is complex (not necessarily as defined by the FAA or EASA) or difficult to handle

That exactly is what is behind it.

The Bonanza was the first airplane to bear this title. At the time, it was quite expensive in comparison and therefore attracted people with a lot of cash, professionals who are used to getting things done their way and who felt quite invincible. Most of the accidents the Bonanzas had were caused by people who overestimated their skills.

The same goes for the Malibu and the Cirrus. All of those are very expensive airplanes that only people can own who have a LOT of money to spare. And some of those have the cash but not the talent.

I have always read into it another suggestion, that the doctor is rushing to get somewhere important (to save a life) and therefore does not pay full attention to what he is doing.

I think your ‘professional arrogance’ term has much weight.
In my experience, there are three sorts of people who choose to fly: youngsters/wannabees, retirees and middle-aged professionals. If we stick with the middle age people they almost all follow this stereotype:

• Successful businessmen, normally in senior management positions or company directors/owners.
• They don’t ‘do’ failure.
• They come from a background where they have learnt quickly and need little reinforcement; acceptance that being a pilot takes time, effort and practice is not necessarily instinctive.
• They are used to throwing money at problems.
• Alpha Males

Here’s a thought – it would be really interesting to see what percentage of women pilots manage to kill themselves against their male counterparts. Anecdotally, I suspect the men would score quite poorly.

Dave,

While I agree, I think that you have missed an important category which is big enough to deserve its own mention. That is the senior techie type, often in IT, but also engineers, scientists, academics.

They, if one is going to generalise, are accurate and careful and apply SOPs rigidly and from memory and are, in my opinion and experience, the safest category of private pilot.

Good points Dave, but also I think there is an inevitable correlation between owning a plane which does more than 10 mph and

• having sufficient money and independence (I could not have done it before getting divorced)
• being smart enough to get a PPL and probably extra ratings
• having time to throw at it
• being obscessive enough to stick through it
• being far sighted enough to put up with the frequent crap that happens in schools (like lessons getting bumped to do a “trial lesson” for a walk-in birthday party)
• actually using the PPL for real

So the “doctor killer” or “banker killer” or whatever name one gives it, is a self-fulfilling label – simply because not many others are going to be in a position to crash a plane like that in the first place

it would be really interesting to see what percentage of women pilots manage to kill themselves against their male counterparts

Very few, but that is IMHO because

• there are few women in GA – many previous threads on this but IMHO the mostly poor social scene and the silly pompous posers are a major factor in that
• there are few women in business (the easiest way to make a lot of money)
• women tend to not be obscessive enough to grind through the long training pipeline and the additional hassle of being an aircraft owner (obscessive hobbies are more of a male thing) so very few end up flying the planes which are the subject here

Based on the very few examples I know in flying I would not say women take fewer risks!

I do wish there were many more women in GA – it would really improve the whole scene.

I think that you have missed an important category which is big enough to deserve its own mention. That is the senior techie type, often in IT, but also engineers, scientists, academics.

The majority here on EuroGA – see the old Occupations thread. IT/engineering/science people have a major advantage with aircraft systems (applicable especially to IFR).

Dave_Phillips wrote:

it would be really interesting to see what percentage of women pilots manage to kill themselves against their male counterparts.

Yes it would. There are claims that women are less involved in severe car wrecks. There was however a report here of a female captain that accepted the suggestion of her FO to roll a Citation…