I suspect that the offences listed are only what can be proven beyond reasonable doubt in court.
Yes, but one should not be convicted on hearsay.
According to contemporary reports, the TBM pilot was almost lynched after he landed, with the aircraft blocked in by vehicles so it could not "escape". Clearly there is more to this than has come out, but I know nothing one way or the other. I was just making the points that
1) you cannot have a "lost comms" procedure and then set it aside and bust the pilot if you think it wasn't genuine or was the result of a pilot error
2) you cannot know the
actual flight conditions as seen by the pilot so cannot say the other aircraft was seen by him (which is why "VFR in IMC" is almost never prosecuted except in the best witness-supported (or the most vindictive, like the German cases) scenarios
A VFR pilot cannot land (ATC case) without a landing clearance unless it is an emergency but this is not the case for IFR on a properly filed IFR route.
I guess we will never know what happened.
Another thing is that NG cases are not listed
