Communications

Communications

To the editor:

Edward Constant's excellent article in the April 2006 issue of Technology and Culture, "A Tale of Two Bonanzas: How Knowledgeable Communities Think about Technology" (pp. 253–85), was a joy to read. However, because his elegant theory of the Belief-O-Meter is calibrated by sales figures alone, there are some messy questions that his work leaves unaddressed. Recognizing this, Constant notes that we would need a detailed microsociology of aviation in order to deal with these loose ends, and he's right. In fact, we have to do this sociological grunt work in order for his Belief-O-Meter to accurately capture the differences between V-tail and straight-tail Bonanza buyer-pilots. The reason is that, in my experience, general aviation aircraft are never purchased or flown for purely rational reasons; emotion is always a major factor in what, why, and how pilots choose to fly, no matter what they say to anyone else.

All pilots who fly because they want to are sensation-seekers, but I suspect that most V-tail owner-operators would score very high on the sensation-seeking as well as on the status-seeking scales. It used to be common to call V-tail Bonanzas "fork-tailed doctor-killers," not because their tails tended to twist off unexpectedly, but because doctors were believed to be most likely to own them—doctors who were also believed to imagine themselves to be godlike, and who thus were believed to fly in ways that prudent pilots did not. Such doc-pilots, the pop-psych take had it, wanted to fly hard and to be known as successful risk-takers. Nobody believed that doc-pilots accounted for all V-tail purchases, but twenty-five years ago, when I was working for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), it was common among other pilots to think that doc-pilots might be overrepresented in the loss-of-control crashes. Obviously, whether or not the doc-killer tag for the V-tail contained any truth can only be determined by an incident-by-incident investigation, a microanalysis that would allow us to get close to the personal, professional, and behavioral differences and similarities among the V-tail pilots involved in fatal loss-of-control crashes.

Finding these similarities and differences is important because the V-tail's real drawing power was never simply quantitative—that is, its speed—but qualitative. The V-tail gets noticed as straight-tail Bonanzas or similar single-engine aircraft don't. On any airport ramp, the V-tail stands out just as a peacock's tail feathers do, and the owner gets admiring (or envious) attention, just as the peacock does. In short, the V-tail has sex appeal.

In the context of the Belief-O-Meter (a terrific concept), I think the conclusion that Bonanza owners can be represented as essentially similar "rational agents" is thus unjustified. In my experience, there is likely to be as big a gulf in personality type between the V-tail and straight-tail Bonanza pilots as between Porsche 930 and 928 owner-drivers. Driven aggressively, the turbocharged, rear-engine 930 could swap ends in corners very quickly, due to its tendency to oversteer; this could induce the unwary or unschooled to back off the throttle (to "lift," in car-guy-speak) too quickly, which could result in a spin. The front-engine 928 was also fast, but it was "honest" in that it handled predictably right up to the breakaway point at the limit of its tires' adhesion. These traits were known among sports car enthusiasts, and it is important in this context to note that the car was valued by alpha or would-be alpha types precisely because of its reputation as a difficult car to drive well at or near its limits. What would be the point if any doofus with dough could drive it fast?

Such pop-psych...