The trouble with this fascinating accident is that there are so many things we don't and just cannot know. We *do* know that Ara was scooting along at a pretty good clip in fairly bad weather, which is incautious. His course along his route of flight was full of heading changes both large and small, and I strongly suspect that his eyes were outside the cockpit, not constantly centering the heading bug on the HSI. When he reported to ATC that he was climbing to 4,000, I assume that his intention was to continue toward Camarillo on top of whatever scud layer he just encountered. I doubt that he was intentionally making a 180. But again, who knows? My guess as a pilot is that Ara had not considered the possibility of performing a 180, because if he had, he probably would not have been cruising along at 140 knots. I think he really thought he could make it to Camarillo VFR.
When Ara cleared out of Van Nuys' airspace, he reported that he was in "VFR conditions" at 1500 feet. Well...maybe. (Van Nuys was only reporting 2.5 vis.) We can presume that he was just under the overcast. As he got into the foothills around Calabasas, the ground was coming up, squeezing him into a narrow slot. He obviously ran into the low fog/cloud deck just as he got to the intersection of Route 101 and Las Virgenes Road. The 101 cuts through a pass right there. If Ara was down low over the road, then he would have had hills rising up on both sides of him, the tops of which were likely obscured by clouds/fog. At some point he must have punched-in, because he reported to SoCal Approach that he was climbing to 4000 feet. Now we *know* he had to be IMC. And that's where it all came apart. The S-76 reached an altitude of 2370 feet and began a descending, ever-steepening left turn. It impacted a hill at 1100 feet MSL, slightly below the peak. I doubt that he would have had any visual reference until a millisecond or so prior to impact. I maintain that Ara's eyes were probably not on the AI, and when (or if) they ever returned to the panel, it was way too late to do anything.
Maybe some of you super-heroes could've pulled off that save (depending on at what point you realized it was all going pear-shaped). But for the rest of us mere mortal pilots, I think it would've been a real - and probably unsuccessful - challenge to get the thing wings-level and climbing before smashing into something solid...like Earth.