He had a CPL with
NO instrument rating and the airplane was maintained for VFR only.
However, he had what EASA calls nowadays the "basic instrument flying module", enabling you to climb, descent, turn in IMC / under the hood, and also recover from unusual attitudes under simulated IMC. In short, you are able to keep or recover control in IMC, but it doesn't make you capable to do any instrument departure or approach procedures yet.
I had a thorough "torturing" with power-on/departure stalls and unusual attitude recoveries in simulated IMC from my CPL instructor recently, so unfortunately I think I can see how this happened
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With low-time experience, he didn't feel having the authority to call of the drop or drop from lower altitude.
As the clouds grew taller during the day, they gave him a false horizon. As he tried to get higher with the heavy load, his airspeed decayed and the aircraft stalled with climb power to the left, due to insufficient right rudder (to offset the lower airspeed).
Power-on stalls with climb power are different ballgame than the the relatively benign power-off/approach stalls. They come by surprise, with a big startle factor. The resulting pitch change is very large, very fast.
I was taught that on recognition of the wing drop due to the power on stall, I should just let the airplane do what it wants initially and stop trying to analyze and solve the problem immediately.
Instead, the 2 things however I had to do immediately is CONTROLS NEUTRAL and POWER TO IDLE.
The aircraft will accelerate rapidly anyway, and by the time I ensured the basics, it might even have sufficient speed to get it under control and bring it back to level flight. If it went into a spin, recover from it, if it went into a diving spiral already, bring it back to level flight.
But under simulated IMC, there is a huge temptation to pull too hard and too much in a dive, or spiral diver. It takes a lot of self-control to get it to wings level, pitch attitude to level flight, despite the engine still roaring and ASI still approaching the redline Vne. Timely but gently pull, power off and level attitude will eventually avoid going into Vne and the situation calms down, power needs to be added to maintain level flight and then we can think about getting out of the cloud.
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I am quite sure he recovered from the stall, but he probably forget to pull the power to idle and quickly accelerated towards Vne and pulled very hard to slow down, causing the inflight breakup.
This pilot had all the necessary training to recover.
But he had that training 5 years before, and haven't flown for 4 years in between at all.
Makes you think that after 4 years of absence from flying, it's really advisable to refresh some of the most important CPL exercises, such as the power-on stall recoveries and unusual attitude recoveries in IMC, especially with high-load climb operations like jump operations and the Swedish weather, which is often cloudy.
By the way, sometimes jumpers help stall even bigger aircraft...
