Originally Posted by
OldLurker
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.
But it seems very likely that the pilot only undid his harness to look at the rudder to see why the aircraft had strange yaw characteristics. The disconnected rudder cable should have been easy to spot in a pre-flight inspection- and should certainly not have escaped whatever inspection was done after work had been done on the rudder.