Butterfly
The vast majority of pilots who crashed were viewed as being professional and serious about their flying. There are luckily only a few rogues in the air.
It is far too early to decide on what caused the accident.
Pilots here speculate as a matter of course about the causes, often based on limited information, simply because the mere process of analysis seems to tune our brain so that we may be safer in the future.
Furthermore accident causes are often a sequence of events, not a single one.
In this case whilst nobody denies there could have been a medical cause, the most pointy information we have is the weather which was very poor, possibly nil visibility between 5000 and 600.
There is no landing system at the airport, only an IFR (instrument flying) aproach to runway 31 which has to be converted to VFR(visual flight rules, meaning requiring visibility) at no lower than 1500 feet but in fact expected much sooner thus higher, which was likely impossible given the cloud base.
We don't know if he choose to land at RWY 31 or 13 but in both cases it is unlikely that he would have been visual with the runway at the minimum decision height of 1500.
We also don't know if he made the IFR approach and then circled back west to turn for runway 13 or that he in fact crashed well before starting the IFR procedure
Many of us are wondering why he did not divert to Vienna where an automatic landing system was available (with lower Minimum Decision Altitude)
Get-home-itis is a term used to describe an urge to keep going to the landing site even in dangerous or illegal circumstances. It has killed many pilots and has to do with human psychology
Bert
PS I should ad that all pilots I know review plane accidents, and this is therefore not a good benchmark to decide if a pilot is professional. It is part of our training to do so.
Even if he made a fatal mistake, this does not make him a bad pilot, we are all human after all. He died doing something he must have loved a LOT even if this consolation is a painful one for those remaining behind.
Last edited by vanHorck; 17th Dec 2008 at 16:51.