As noted I am still quite new to aviation and learn an entirely new, aviation-specific language the more I read and hear about the topic. Apart from all the (sometimes ridiculous) abbreviations and acronyms I sometimes stumble over casual terms which puzzle me.
One such term is that of a “doctor killer” aircraft. I noticed this term several times on the wider internet as well as a few appearances on this forum. A quick google search seems to mostly define it as a nickname for the Beechcraft Bonanza (the model 35 V-tail version especially, example) due to a series of high-profile incidents in the 50s.
But I also found the term to be used in a broader way, refering to any GA aircraft that is
I must admit that as a doctor myself, this term just “got me”. More so because I do consider the Bonanza as a good choice when/if I manage to buy my own aircraft someday. Thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that it is probably more about the pilot (the “human factors”) than the aircraft that makes a “doctor killer” (admittably many others came to the same conclusions for decades already).
So I turned the definition upside down and thought about which characteristics could possibly make me as a doctor (or other doctors or similarly high-skill, high-earning, high social status professionals) more likely to crash when flying a high-performance aircraft? During brainstorming, I came up with
So what do you think? Are “doctor killer” aircraft a thing, or is it the doctors killing themselves when flying? Or both? Or is this entire topic overblown and doctors don’t suffer from fatal accidents any more than other GA pilots?
PS: Please take the descriptions I wrote above with a grain of salt
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 issomewhat 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:
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
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
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…