JT, I am aware of your background from the 'old Pprune'!
While not wishing to preempt the ATSB conclusions on this accident, I have my personal views based on 50 yrs of GA flying in Australia and New Zealand - mostly PVT/work related flying both VFR and IFR in SE aircraft, but also some IFR charter work in both countries.
I also have a personal connection to the pax on this flight, which has stirred me up to question, yet again, why these types of accidents keep happening.
My first experience of the fallout from this type of accident was soon after I got my PPL - a young bloke who learnt to fly with me was lost, along with his wife and a child on a flight from Archerfield to Bankstown.
Like many (most?) with a substantial experience background, I have put myself in life-threatening VFR into IMC situations on a number of occasions in the early days of my flying career, never with pax (although on one occasion in NZ my pax was a bloke in a coffin!), and the fact that I am writing this attests to the fact that I survived to tell the tale - by a combination of good training, quick descision making and LUCK!
As a low-time VFR PPL I descended into a layer of cloud that I 'knew' to be only a couple of hundred feet thick - it wasn't! I descended to 1000' about the highest point in the area - then climbed back out, turned back to the edge of the cloud bank and tried to get under it - I couldn't - before returning to my departure point.
By the time I had a few thousand hours, a CPL and IR, I could 'scud run' with the best! One day while trying to get to a cattle station in an area I thought I knew well, I flew down a road at low level just below the cloud base only to find myself in cloud. I immediately climbed and turned left and returned to my departure point. Some time later I discovered that had I turned right I most likely would have impacted a high phone tower I had forgotten about. That ended my scud running days!
The map is fine, but tell me a bit more about the flight instruments. In particular, have you ever flown, under the hood, with all the aircraft instruments covered up, and then use, solely - as in nothing else, the portable flight instrument representation to maintain flight for an extended period of time ? That's the real world test and, if it doesn't work, where might that leave you in the event ..... ?
Yes, I have! I have flown down the Hinchinbrook Channel under the hood at 500' with a safety pilot with reference to only GPS/accelerometer based 'flight instruments' on an iPad and a moving map with terrain warning on a Garmin portable GPS.
In the typical heavy, when the ship's electrickery quits, you are back on the standby flight instruments ... until their batteries also quit .... then you are in the well-known situation of PYHBYLAKYAG. ANY sensible installation will have a similar arrangement,
If fully charged at the outset, an iPad and a portable GPS should give you time to save your skin!
I'm not trying to be a PITA here but, having a lot of IMC, night, and IFR flying in my history, this is a rather important consideration to follow through. It is my thought that many folks, not having tried their backup plans out in REALISTIC anger, may have unrealistic expectations of what is what ?
My experience may not match yours in quantum but its reasonable for someone for whom flying was never a primary job, and interesting in its variety - from cattle mustering and glider/banner towing to quite a bit of single engine day/night IFR.
I am not advocating the routine use of portable electronic gadgets to justify pushing one's luck with weather, but the suggestion was that if you lose all of your panel in an EFIS cockpit you are going to die. Not if you are prepared and have thought the senario through.
The best preventative measures for what I believe is likely to be the cause of this accident and other like it are:
- Good training and currency
- Good preparation, including backup equipment and a quickly activated plan in your head for various circumstances that may arise
- A mental firewall against 'got-to-get-there-itis'
- Good in-flight decision making
- Always listen to that little voice in the back of your head when it says, "I don't like the look of this"!