Do you know the pilot was using a mobile phone actually in intermittent IMC with cranes around, as you scathingly say? I suggest you go back and read the report you refer to carefully.
Without being silly, in just around a year there have been a bunch of professionally maintained and operated helicopters in accidents driven by professional pilots. Top blokes all of them I'm sure and so on but you can talk these things around and around forever as many of the recent threads seem to prove.
Not that I'm their
PR but one wonders if Colin McRae or Mark Weir had shunted in similar circumstances if attitudes would be the same?