This is not the Hollywood dude, admired for instant, impulsive, "shoot from the hip" behavior. The actual professional process of flight test would not sell(or even get pitched) as a movie.  It is a slow cautious deliberative team effort. The flights are carefully planned and briefed by the team. The motto at the Naval Test Pilot School was "plan the flight, fly the plan". Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it?  But in reality it's hard to follow, to maintain discipline and the leadership of the team, even when you are repeating a painful data point for the umpteenth time, and maintaining a good attitude about it. (Some hi-G and max touchdown vertical speed data points do hurt, a lot! )

 There is spirited discussion on this list, and that is good! But without agreeing on a definition of our words, some of these discussions just degenerate into meaningless angry exchanges. Next time someone suggests the only qualification for a "test Pilot" (tp: lower case) is a sudden impulse to explore "Vne", or decides to self-adjust the CFI recommended speeds in the traffic pattern, please ask these questions. Who else was on the team? Where was the peer review? How long was the (pre/post) briefing? Where are the test cards detailing the procedure? What school and organizations designated this individual as "an engineering test pilot"? If any of these did not happen, then the subject is not a "designated" test pilot, but instead some kind of Hollywood hero follower, writing his own script.  Even for Hollywood, how would the 'pitch' go, for such a scenario? Not well, I think...

 In the Vne case, it should really be called flutter induced structural failure testing, without any plan, and it apparently has been demonstrated, both in thunderstorms, with Spatial Disorientation, and in over gross weight conditions, with passengers unqualified in any way to understand their risk (or death). Getting slow in the pattern is not a reasonable impulsive tp solution. This definition of "Test Pilot" is important because these two scenarios seem to be the vast majority of causal factors in our communities' fatalities.

 Let's agree not to self designate ourselves as test pilots. Even those of us who were former test (mil or civ/airline) pilots need to remember that without the structure, currency, and team effort, we are sometimes tempted to stray from the discipline required of the professional. Tom Wolfe coined the term "Right Stuff" in a book about test pilots. It actually defines a psychological defense mechanism we use to protect ourselves from unfortunate deaths of close colleagues. After the mishap, everybody points out how they knew, "all along", that guy did not have the "right stuff". Hollywood promotes the myth that something like "right stuff" actually exists, but in fact it is just a rather weak psychological defense mechanism, to explain away the unfortunate mishap, and why "that" won't happen to me. Sometimes, I have observed, the mishap occurs because of a 'perfect storm', an alignment of improbable causal factors that the best pilots could not solve. Unfortunately, as the mishap investigations show, it is far more common to find multiple "pilot error"s as the cause(s). Maybe it was a guy who fanaticized himself as a Hollywood Hero, following the hero myth. How about, instead, a new acronym like "To Engineering Standards Test": TEST Pilot!

 We have the resources and the experts, reading this list. None of these standards are inaccessible here, but only the discipline, teams, and hard work required to maintain such a standard. All of these standards, in military, civil, and airline aviation, evolved through an evolutionary process, "written in blood". The same could happen here, and save many more lives, especially of the innocent passengers, who often mistakenly trust their (test?) pilot.