This is a complex sociological subject and will require a book, not a
usenet email to analyze...

The issue here is the professional, 40 something usually,
intelligent, aggressive results oriented, no excuses, person who has
spent most of the first half of his life getting 20 or more years of
formal education, another 10-15 years of building a prefessional
reputation and growing his business, who can now afford the payments
on a $600K machine... There are issues of deferred gratification, a
sense of having to look invulnerable, and lots of other stuff I will
only allude to but otherwise ignore...
He is goal oriented (going to be here, there, and over there, and so
on, today), time driven (can't be late), and has relatively low pilot
experience, both in logbook time, and calendar time...

Now the profession doesn't matter... I like the old "fork tailed
doctor killer" attribution because it wraps up the whole package in
one pithy statement... But it is also the guy with three franchise
restaurants, doctors, lawyers, and maybe even indian chiefs... It is
the personality set that matters, not the business that makes it
financially possible...
The airplane is also variable... Used to be the venerable fork tail,
now it is the SR 22 currently the favorite yuppie status symbol with
that "parachute"

Now, I don't know what I would have done had that been my son I was
picking up at that airport that night... My view of the world is
colored by years of flying... I fly in the Great Lakes ice machine out
over those fresh water seas and often at night... So I fly a clapped
out old twin, for the second motor and other reasons that don't matter
here not much of a status symbol, eh... Given this airport down in
a hole, a pitch black night, no horizon, rapidly rising ground, and
low clouds; given that I been up since 5AM and worked a full day and
that it was now some 16 hours later; given my family was on board, I
might have refused the takeoff and waited for light...

denny