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Technology and Culture 47.2 (2006) 253-285



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A Tale of Two Bonanzas

How Knowledgeable Communities Think about Technology

For owners and pilots of V-tail Beechcraft Bonanzas, the fall of 1986 truly was the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, they were the proud possessors of arguably the most beautiful, and certainly the most widely recognized, private airplane in the world. On the other hand, the classic V-tails of their Model 35 Bonanzas had an indisputable tendency to come off at inopportune moments, with predictably untidy results. Owners of straight-tail Bonanzas were somewhat better off: neither the Model 33, the sort of frumpy, pillared, sedan version of the sexy Model 35 "hardtop," nor the stretched Model 36, the station-wagon version, had exhibited any problems with in-flight tail failure.1 How the Bonanza community—owners and pilots, their association (the American Bonanza Society [ABS]), the Beech Aircraft Corporation, and responsible regulatory agencies (the National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB] and the Federal Aviation Administration [FAA])—responded to the problem of V-tail Bonanza in-flight breakups provides a nice if not terribly exceptional case study of a technological crisis and its resolution. But what makes this case different is [End Page 253] the insight it can offer into how ordinary consumers—here, owners and pilots and prospective purchasers of these airplanes—not only participated in and responded to crisis but also thought about technology.

A lot of recent scholarship in the history of technology has moved away from traditional concerns with science, research and development, invention, innovation, engineering, and production to the social, broadly construed to include the roles of workers, users, and consumers in shaping, co-constructing, or negotiating technological artifacts and practices.2 Results on the whole have been salutary, but despite some marvelously imaginative uses of nonobvious data to make inferences about the thoughts and life- worlds of ordinary people, evidence for what the simple folk do or think remains sparse and to some extent suspect.3 It's virtually impossible to assess sample bias for populations who ordinarily leave no systematic records.

The V-tail Bonanza controversy provides a natural experiment that goes a long way toward addressing this difficulty.4 Specific variants of Model 35 (V-tail) and Model 33 (straight-tail) Bonanzas are absolutely identical in all respects save for their tail structures, while the Model 36 (also straight-tail) is very nearly identical. Ceteris paribus really holds. This fact of the matter, combined with the particular character of the used airplane market, permits the use of market and price data to make inferences about how the entire relevant community—all of the simple folk—reacted to the emerging crisis and came to credit its resolution. Bonanza owners and pilots represent a class of knowledgeable technological communities, and market data can reveal how such communities collectively attend to expertise, respond to institutionalized authority, and, most important, assess empirical evidence—how they think about technology. [End Page 254]


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Figure 1
Beechcraft Model 35 Bonanza prototype, December 1945. (Courtesy of Raytheon Company via National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution [SI 94-1855].)

The Bonanza's Tail

The Beechcraft Bonanza (figs. 1–3) has been the paragon of private, single-engined airplanes for well over half a century, and has been in continuous production since 1947, longer than any other airplane, of any type, anywhere in the world, ever. Initial design of the Model 35 Bonanza began late in 1944; its first flight occurred in December 1945 and certification and first deliveries in March 1947. The Bonanza set new standards for private airplane aerodynamic cleanliness, structural integrity and strength, build quality, speed, efficiency, handling, and style, all still largely unsurpassed. When first introduced, the Model 35 Bonanza was significantly faster than any production airplane in the world with equal installed horsepower, and, among all private or commercial airplanes, notably slower only than Beechcraft's own twin-engined D18S Twin Beech, Lockheed's big and expensive L...

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