"doctor killer" aircraft

Timothy wrote:

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.

Interesting take on the idea. I don’t think it is applicable to doctors flying somewhere though (except maybe Royal Flying Doctors in Australia, but afaik they don’t fly by themselves anymore these days).

Dave_Phillips wrote:

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.

Excellent summary of the topic, really!

Timothy wrote:

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.

This kind of pilot seems to appear quite a lot on EuroGA

Peter wrote:

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

This is probably the most mundane explanation for the term, which doesn’t make it any less correct. Nowadays “banker killer” would probably more correct if someone where to create the term anew.
My salary is at about 54,000€ a year, before taxes. This will rise as I climb up the career ladder, but for German hospital doctors it doesn’t really more than double unless you become head of a departement. So at 110k a year before taxes (which in Germany means you take home maybe half of it at best) you won’t be able to buy a luxurious plane any time soon as long as you have a family, a house, a car as well, all of which require financial upkeep as well.

huv wrote:

And no, in my experience doctors are not inferior pilots – perhaps rather the opposite, in general.

That is an uplifting observation for me RobertL18C wrote:

Ironically they are likely to end up as Captains, via the low cost airline route, to the better educated, integrated cadets on the national carriers who may take many years to achieve command. A nice inversion of the old officer class culture with the seargeant pilots achieving command earlier.

Is that really so? Interesting. In Germany in particular we have an obsession with academic qualifications and people who have them generally have it easier in almost all walks of life. As many other posters said before, such qualifications do not matter much when piloting an aeroplane. Aerodynamics aren’t going to ask you for your graduation certificate…

dylan_22 wrote:

“Doctor killer”: What Jason wrote. Bonanza, Malibu and Cirrus are the typical “doctor planes”. Too much airplane for too little experience (doctors typically do not only have ore money but many of them also have less time to practice).

The “less time to practice” part is quite relevant indeed. Today I was supposed to have a flying lesson. After my 18 hour night shift in which I only slept for two and a half hours, there was no way I was going to climb into an aeroplane before getting some sleep first. Unfortunately, when I woke up again in the afternoon the weather had deteriorated, so that we had to cancel the lesson completely :(