Originally posted by Bubbers44 :
In all my years I have never done a preflight briefing of weather enroute. We look at what is shown and take off knowing what to expect. They must have encountered some icing and their pitot tubes froze up. That alone apparently took the airplane down for some reason. There is no evidence of their deviation 12 miles left of course not being adequate.
Using the fact they crashed is silly. If they iced up 40 miles off course probably wouldn't have made any difference. Hopefully the final report will clarify everything but right now we have zilch info.
Congratulations "Bubbers", at last one sensible post on this subject :
1) I can't, either, remember of one pre-flight route modification due to en-route weather ;
2) as far as we know, the cause of the crash is not "
flying straight into an active cb" but pitot icing.
Icing conditions can be found anywhere : in, near or far away from convective cells.