Lately I have been so immersed in (1) rotorcraft safety and (2) counter-MANPADs issues, that I haven't been keeping up, but I do have to tell you that a awful lot of ATPs have fatals in light homebuilt rotorcraft. Figuring (off the top of my head) that as many as 1/3 of pilots are ATPs (check with AOPA for accurate numbers), that may not be disproportionate, but it certainly disproves the notion that they are automagically safer by dint of their demonstrated skills (for any laymen reading this thread, an Airline Transport Pilot rating requires 1,500 hours of pilot time with certain sub-requirements and a written and flight test to higher standards than the Commercial certificate. You must have an ATP to act as captain of a scheduled airliner -- the copilot can fly on a Commercial ticket. It is generally considered the pinnacle of recognised pilot ratings).
What I have seen is a guy who is master of an enormous liner, with documentation alone that weighs more than a light experimental, not have enough respect for the machine. Remember that a machine that flies low and slow has an interesting characteristic -- it can just barely kill you, as opposed to shredding you into a thorny identification problem, but for you (and your loved ones) the outcome is the same.
One accident that sticks in my mind. A 35000 hour helicopter pilot made a bad decision 30 feet AGL -- negative transfer of skills from military turbine copters to a 2-cycle piston machine with very low inertia rotors was a factor -- and he didn't live to critique his error. It was that close for him and his family.
The "dangerous doctor" pilot is a stereotype that the Insurance companies definitely believe in -- and they try to make it financially painful for anyone to operate a complex aircraft without adequate training and currency. I see this in the homebuilt world where people spend three or nine years building a machine that they didn't have the chops to fly before they quit flying to spend all their time building. The essential problem here is that the ability to own a plane does not give you the ability to fly a plane.
In my experience, flying doctors/lawyers/CEOs tend to either conform completely to the stereotype (attempting to overcome machine and nature by force of will), or apply similar learning abilities that allowed them to become successful professionals: in other words, a dual-polar Zipf distribution of risk-taking with many of them very methodical and many others very risk-prone. It's an interesting field of human factors study.
Also -- and this certainly applies to me, even though the barbers have me grounded right now -- almost all of us think we are better pilots than we really are.
An excellent book for those interested in pilots and risk-taking behaviour is Darker Shades of Blue: the Rogue Pilot by Tony Kern. Anything by Tony Kern, actually. If you see yourself in Darker Shades -- as I did -- it's a kind of frightening learning experience.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F