Originally Posted by
greifandpain
Thank you for your kind words. Just so everybody knows. The AP was starting to fog in on the approach (see tracking) as pilot tries to find AP. Before the plane departs, fog set in fully. Commercial flight also at AP at the time prefers to stay on ground. AF takes off in IFR, eventually impacts terrain inverted and flips over.
Result 2 innocent people who trusted pilot to look after them are dead.
Failing that a mechanical condition of plane or medical incident of the pilot, the cause will be "Spatial disorientation". Possibly combined with some situation that drew the pilot's attention away from instruments.
A very experienced pilot has difficulty in this situation but with training and experience has a very good expectation of only wetting his trousers.
An inexperience pilot just needs to keep the plane straight, get air speed, rotate, listen to engine sound and use instruments to keep wings level until aircraft clears fog bank. All relatively easy UNLESS something goes wrong - that is where experience and training come in to be very important.
Example: conditions induce carburetor icing, engine starts to loose power, vibration. Realization forgot heater. eyes off instruments, find heater control, possibly stall alarm, enrich fuel, loses 200 RPM due to carburetor de-icing, stall warning still sounding, lower the nose to keep up air speed. What the hell is going on!!!!! Start turn to airport. If stall alarm had stopped, the turn brings it back on. Where am I?? stall alarm should not be sounding, Iv'e put the nose down!!!! Looks to instruments it's all confusing!!! inside wing finally stalls, aircraft rolls over hits the ground at a 30% angle and flips. That is what happens without training and lack of experience with IFR will do. Dose that sound plausible. I flew gliders fifty years ago.
If the problem turns out to be medical or mechanical it all could possibly have been better handled by a pilot flying VFR instead of IFR.
The same pilot took his grand children on joy rides apparantly, I bet it was never in IFR conditions though.
The really sad thing is Twenty minutes later fog lifts completely to a clear sky.
We won’t really know until we get an ATSB report. And I sincerely hope it’s a better quality report than many of the recent ones.
But, as I understand it, the aircraft took off into a fog layer, which is different than departing IMC into cloud. The pilot had only recently landed, so he would have had an understanding of how high the fog extended. From the altitude the aircraft reached, it’s conceivable that he was through the fog layer. In which case it was not simple spatial disorientation. Even if you are not completely climbed through fog, vertically upward you can see sky and have a sense of the horizon. I would be surprised if the pilot didn’t have some sort of horizon at the high point of the flight.
With any sort of reasonable climb rate, one might have thought this aircraft would have climbed through the fog in maybe 45 seconds, by which time the aircraft is on its way in the same VMC conditions that the pilot arrived in only maybe 30 minutes earlier. I don’t know whether or not the aircraft had an autopilot, but a simple wing leveller would have made getting through a fog layer reasonably easy.
It not clear to me if there was a base under the fog. But it’s also possible the pilot was visual at 100 -200 ft AGL. In which case it would be conceivable that the pilot could get back to Mt Gambier safely - albeit illegally low.
Fog is odd stuff. It’s not homogenous and it’s not static. Maybe the pilot thought he was taking off during a temporary thinn8ng of the fog. I would expect that the ATSB will have a number of witnesses with experience ( ie pilots, met officers, etc) who will be interviewed on the conditions at the time.
In my opinion, this accident is more much more complex than a VFR pilot becoming disoriented in IMC.
This was a tragic accident that saddens me greatly. But, until the ATSB bring down their findings, I like to give the pilot credit for being more experienced than the vast majority of charter flight pilots and that he was ( if for no other reason than self preservation) making his best effort to conduct a a safe flight.