Growahead, thanks for your posts; you've made some good points and some of your analogies add usefully to the discussion. In regards to this:
I think an important aspect of this accident was that the pilot consciously chose to take his chances in IMC. Reports are that the aircraft circled for about 30 mins, then climbed into the cloud base.
You could be correct. There could have been a conscious choice along the lines of "Okay well this holding I've been doing for 30 minutes now is not working out. I'd be better off going up into the cloud and heading further towards home and hopefully exit the cloud a little further along". Clearly a conscious choice to take the flight into IMC and one that carried with it very serious consequences for which we could all shake our heads with the benefit of hindsight (especially when considering what the eventual outcome was) and think, "Mmm; wasn't the right thing to do...."
Or you might not be framing this whole scenario correctly either. What I think Fantome was getting at
Oh . . . so what enables you to reconstruct the flight with insight into what conscious thoughts occupied the pilot's mind between take-off and crash site?
And what have I and many others been doing wrong all these years, failing to grasp what makes "inadvertent VFR to VMC" so hazardous?
is that the reality is likely to be far more complex and less black and white. There are "reports" of the aircraft "holding" for 30 minutes and then going into cloud. Like so many things, the reality is that we just will never know what was actually happening in the cockpit of that aircraft or the mind of the pilot when the aircraft was sighted circling near the Borumba Dam area and then went into cloud. He may have been in a terrible high terrain situation flying low with the circling radius being squeezed by some low hanging mist and suddenly faced with quick flashes of in and out of IMC whilst down low at steep bank levels with hills all around. The sudden realisation that he was going to be IMC any moment whether he liked it or not may have resulted in him levelling the wings, applying full power and ascending into the cloud to climb away from the rapidly deteriorating visual situation where he was circling that may have offered nothing but a very rough ground high speed crash with poor forward visibility or a belief that he was likely to impact one of the hills during a turn because his ability to see properly was so hampered, he couldn't make out the hills clearly and his turning radius was getting dangerously tight (or dozens of other possible scenarios that none of us may even think of....)
It may have all happened in a few murky seconds. Visual one moment, flashing in and out of cloud the next. No time to go for a sudden forced landing and certainly not survivable ground. Next thing; full power, wings level, keep it straight, up he went to make a choice for something less dangerous at that very moment (flight into IMC) than going for a less than 'controlled' crash. The time critical, highly unstable and uncertain world of marginal VFR conditions down low in rough terrain is a terrible place to find yourself and these sudden extreme decisions are thrust upon you with little preparedness or mental capacity for the weighing up of options.
We certainly all should think about what brought him to that critical point; circling low in bad conditions that he eventually flew away from into IMC (and then ultimately to a fatal crash site). It's all the decisions prior to that point that are likely to be where this accident's real genesis lies. Right back to the decision to go to Monto for the weekend with passengers who most likely needed to be back for the Monday, and when they couldn't get back on the Sunday afternoon and then stayed over probably needed to be back even more on Monday afternoon to go to work or for other commitments in Brisbane on the Tuesday (maybe not all of them but Jan who worked at Virgin Australia may have been due back at work and this would have created additional pressure).
I guess what I'm saying is that it's very easy to talk about a pilot's choices (post fatal crash), in a manner that's suggestive of the pilot making a black and white decision to do something they weren't qualified to do and then surmising that the entire event hinged on this one bad call i.e. "flight into IMC when the pilot wasn't IFR rated". This type of thinking is what's facilitated the rise of the term "pilot error" this past century or more since aircraft started dropping out of the sky. A notion that a single error caused the accident and it was "the pilot's fault". As we've become more aware of human factors in aviation accidents, things like the Swiss cheese model have started to bring awareness that a whole series of events facilitate and allow an accident scenario to develop and be fulfilled.
(From rereading your post growahead it's fairly clear you're already pretty aware of this stuff. I'm just articulating it here for the benefit of the overall discussion and an acknowledgement of how a forum like this can be very beneficial but also the limitations of people's writing styles can suggest notions that may not be accurate too.)
I think the big big wake up call here is the need to teach pilots the skills to recognise the beginnings of a likely accident sequence and how to nip it in the bud very early. As I've noted in a previous post on this thread, I long ago learnt that taking people and yourself away for a weekend where you have to get back in order for you or your passengers to fulfil some crucial duty the next day (like going to a job or needing to be there for family, etc) is a pressure for the VFR pilot that is just too likely to adversely affect your decision making and result in flight into IMC. And whether it's inadvertent or deliberate is not so much the issue; it's all the pressure to perform, complete the mission, demonstrate your great pilot competency, maintain that reputation as 'an excellent pilot' and get everyone home on time that lines the holes up ready for disaster to take over. It's in this area where we need to get people thinking about how to avoid needing to then make a life or death decision to go into IMC because they've found themselves trapped in a scud running corner and have no other option.
Ren