Oh boy, don't get me started. I will try to use only the good analogies and throw out the bad ones.
I hope this doesn't come out sounding the wrong way but no matter how you look at it doctors almost certainly kill more people than almost anyone else. But they also save more people than anyone else, and we hope the second figure is at least a magnitude of order higher than the first.
By the nature of the work, Doctors will almost certainly kill more people than anyone else. You pretty much need organized culling as population control or cannibalism to not.
Doctors don't exactly have an easy job, and there are a good few doctors who don't particularly have the required intelligence to be able to do the job well. Our educational system has plenty of gaps that one can buy their way through into a career they aren't suited for. Unfortunately, medicine can be a highly lucrative field, so you will have a percentage who are just there for the money. They can do enough damage that they can really mess with averages across an industry.
What is lacking in pilot testing is reaction type to imminent death stress. There are two basic reactions that people will have. From appearances you have the same type reaction for perpetuity, it's in your wiring. One type disassociates from the experience. They freeze up, and for them it's like they are watching it happen in a movie, there they are.
The other is the time dilator. Everything is dead calm and peaceful, you just think clearly about your options, make choices, commit actions, all very matter of fact, like when I went in the oats, 'tail down, wings level, keep her in a straight line' as well as many things leading up to that. The interesting thing is I know my entry speed into the oats, and I could measure my track in them from the beginning to where the plane came to rest. I can also remember every thought and action clearly, and can replay them against a stop watch. When I measure the tracks and do the math, I come up with 1.3 seconds. When I think the thoughts in 'standard time', the stopwatch says 15 seconds. I am far from the only person that reports this reaction/affect.
You don't often hear about people that disassociate describing their crash experiences, because they typically don't survive. "Fly the plane as far into the crash as you can." Is the key to survival. A good example of disassociation can be found in the CVR transcript of Air France 447. There were 3 pilots in one cockpit who all disassociated, and it cost everyone their lives. This accident was recoverable all the way to the very end. If the guy in the left seat had put the nose down and the power to full at 12,000' when he took it over, he could have still saved it, but he just leveled the wings and held the nose high stall.
If they would have had one "Time Dilator" in the cockpit, they would have been fine. Heck, if when the Captain got to the cockpit he reached in and pushed the stick forward, they would have been fine.
This is the quality I think needs to be tested for at the Capt/Command ATP level if we want to improve safety further than exists today, which honestly isn't too bad. One issue is that the military used to provide over half the pilots that the airlines got. Both by the nature of military training and a military career, most of the 'dis associative' reacting people got washed out of the pilot pool before they got to the airlines. Civilian training does not provide the same standards and you can be a career airline captain and never know how you would react to a death stress.
