What bothers me so much about this accident is that it wasn't just some goober 135-pilot in a VFR-only Bell 206 who punched-in and lost it. No, it was the *Chief Goober*...an Instrument Rated Chief Goober...in an all-singing, all-dancing S-76, a helicopter fully capable of IFR flight with a big ol' attitude indicator positioned right in front of him...unlike the aforementioned 206 in which the flight instrument group are skewed off to the left. And yet this Chief Goober punched-in and then somehow lost control while in the process of climbing through a relatively thin layer/deck. (We can assume that he knew that it was a thin layer - I mean, there were probably enough breaks for him to have seen up through it. And so climbing up on top and continuing on VFR to Camarillo was probably his exact plan.)
Two pilots might have helped! Oh really? Tell that to the passengers of that two-pilot AW-139 that crashed in the Bahamas when those two goobers couldn't even make a (basically) ITO at night.
Or how's about back in 2019 when that Instrument Rated girl in the EMS 407 that snowy day in Ohio, U.S. who arrived at the base before sunrise and jumped into the ship with it already running, and then blasted off without doing a proper (and required) weather check or risk-assessment..
And those are just three. There are others - I'm sure you can come up with some right off the top of your head. So here's the thing: What does this say about us as a group? To me, it says that we're pretty crappy pilots when it comes to decision-making and skills. We need to stop thinking that we're all heroes and that none of these accidents would ever happen to us, because we're so much better than them dead goobers.
And then maybe there'd be a few less dead goobers.