Originally Posted by
megan
Wonder if a better preflight may have saved the day.
Perhaps. The report states that the aircraft had previously done three sectors that day apparently without incident, two of them flown by the accident pilot (21,000-hour ATPL holder, apparently retired) and one by a friend, neither whom spotted the problem at preflight despite being aware of a “rigging issue”, and neither of whom seems to have felt that the “odd yawing” was serious. Moreover, the NTSB determined the probable cause of the accident to be “the pilot’s decision to unlatch his seatbelt during flight, which allowed him to exit the airplane and impact the tail, resulting in a loss of control and impact with terrain”, not the mis-rigging.