Luc Lion, why wouldn't you plan to fly at 5000ft unless there was icing in which case you could fly much lower across the channel?

Metars from Cherbourg

Ah yes, Alistair R, seems to be the latest 'expert' these days after Learmount and Gleave.

To be fair, he's an ex-BA 747 pilot, so could reasonably be expected to know about that end of the business. It's not (entirely) his fault that the BBC doesn't understand how irrelevant that is to this event.

I find it difficult to believe that a non IFR pilot was flying this plane, given he/she would hold a commercial licence.

The request to decent was possibly due to icing and to drop out of the clouds to warmer air?

Does anyone know if mayday/7700 was declared? I doubt FR24 will show much?

Piston Malibu

No, the Matrix variant is unpressurised.

Was the pilot confirmed to be commercial? Could be a friend taking him? Even if it was a Matrix, they could have easily climbed to 8000 or 9000?

Any idea if the aircraft was G reg or something else?
With a freezing level at about 3000ft and intermittent precipitation they'd likely have been in significant icing at 4000ft so a descent to 2300 sounds plausibly like a descent into warmer air.
The puzzle is why a relatively powerful aircraft like that wasn't being flown at a more credible altitude above the tops if they were indeeed at 5000?

Long time ago, during "chat hrs" with many students and instructors the "Golden rule" was always => If in trouble? => "Fly the airplane" => Climb, => Call => and Confess.

Only issue here could be icing that prevented the first 2 => Fly the Airplane and Climb. => Why the descend? => Will remain a mystery for ever.

If it was to stay VFR?? At night??? Over the channel? In winter?? In single engine?? With a snow front coming towards you?
Too many questions for my brain.

My money is on ice taking them down (or out of control.) But with that weather announced, they should have stayed on the ground.

Unlikely to have been G-regd. There is only one, privately-owned, P46T on the UK register.

Not French registered either.

Raffels SA : re your Metars from Cherbourg. interesting but will be different over the sea. Channels islands have a micro climate , more interesting wold be to have the one of Alderney. or Guernsey .
anyway lilFlyboy 262 said there was icing one hour before around 3000 and an overcast cloud base at 5000 , for me that could well explains the request to descend to 2000 . Anyway in those conditions diverting to Guernsey should have been a good option for me. But I was not in the cockpit and maybe icing/weather has nothing to do with this accident.,

@anchorhold
I wouldn't fly IFR at 5000ft above Jersey simply because there is no IFR route that low in that area.
And with a P46T pressurised and FIKI, I would fly much higher.
So I really wonder what their flight plan was.

Does anyone know what happened to Tomnod, the people who acquired satellite images and asked the community to examine them for tell tale signs of anything useful? (No sign at tomnod.com)

These people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomnod

It used to be a requirement in France to fly twin engined at night, single engine night was illegal. I assume this must not be a commercial flight or someone is breaking the rules.

The big unanswered questions are;

Who was flying and with what qualifications?
What type exactly are we dealing with? Big differences between all the "Malibu" variants
Why no trace on the various "Radar" websites? FL50 near the CI zone shows traffic almost to ground level normally...

Aircraft Identity?
One BBC report states:-
A spokesman for the French Civil Aviation Authority said the Piper PA46 Malibu aircraft was French but had not been registered in France.

Strange way of putting it.:confused: