Originally Posted by
Pinky1987
The unlicensed pilot with no weather and no maps could have called Pan or mayday and roadblock would have been removed instantly. I wonder if lack of licence was a reason not to call urgency of situation as this would have cause pilot some issues when paperwork was submitted.
There wasn't really any evidence that produced that he hadn't completed a flight review. More like no evidence was found that he had. They didn't find his logbook, they asked 2 flight schools, and CASA did not have a record of a flight review. Submitting the notification to CASA is the responsibility of the instructor, and last flight review I was told to check after a few weeks because CASA apparently have a tendency to lose them. (Have you checked yours?)
He did have a valid medical - I wonder why an active pilot would renew their medical, but ignore the flight review?
As discussed previously in this thread, it appears that there was a misunderstanding between the pilot and ATC. ATC told him a clearance was available through the Class D not above 1000'. No tracking instructions were given. The pilot appears to have read that back as a clearance. Technically it does constitute a class D clearance i.e. 2 way communication.
It appears to me that the pilot believed he had been instructed to descend to 1000' on track.
He didn't want to descend. He had an alternative - divert around the airspace at 6500 - which he was in the process of implementing. But
I suspect that after being bounced between controllers and making 4 requests for clearance, he felt that he couldn't say "Sorry, I don't want the clearance after all" and felt obligated to proceed as instructed.
The GPS would show the boundaries of the airspace, but it is probably difficult to interpret the vertical limits. The pilot probably assumed that if ATC instructed him to descend to 1000, the airspace went down to that level. Then the GPS reported clear of the airspace and he stopped his descent, until the GPS warned that he was about to enter airspace again on the opposite side. At that point he resumed his descent to 1000' as (he believed) instructed.
As for descending into IMC - if the cloud is building up against the hills, there might be a hole where you can see clear air underneath, but the cloud obscures the hill beyond the hole until after you descend through it. If he believed he had been instructed to descend to 1000' on track, he may have assumed that he was clear of the hills and could safely descend through a hole and the clear air would continue underneath.
The communication between the pilot and ATC is critical to this report. I question why the transcript was not provided. I also wonder whether the focus on the pilot's flight review is intended to divert questions away from the ATC role.