Ibbotson's family are now attempting to raise £3000,000 through crowdfunding to locate Ibbotson's body, it's not known how they intend to do this and what happens to the fund if he is washed up on a beech somewhere?

https://www.gofundme.com/f/david-ibb...bring-him-home

I tend to agree with clearprop. Rumour is one thing and PPRuNe has proved its worth on this subject many times. However, repeated speculation, incorrect 'facts' and distasteful comments about the deceased are unpleasant and don't do a service to many of the long term contributors on the site - imho.

Rumors is one thing, but PPRuNe carries 'Pilot' in its name. I see with concern a lot of most probably non-pilots contributing to discussions (or better, I strongly hope some questions are not from pilots), not to speak of the press obviously grabbing information from here (and not always converting it into something originally meant). How can we get on a broader educational scheme to better the information flow to 'ordinary pedestrians'?

I don't.

There are some outstanding contributions on this thread, from posters who, like me, wish to see the biggest, brightest spotlight possible turned full on into the murky opaque world of GA aviation regulation...and kept there!

As for decorum, one can only hope all posters show respect and restraint, but anybody following this tragedy, with any knowledge and insight, are going to be scraping their eyebrows off the ceiling at some of stuff being revealed in the press and other sources.

Difficult. If regulations would be done by people with knowledge I would agree, but regulations are done by regulators and Europe does not have a good history of success in that area.

Yes, eyebrows rising and scraping is the reaction of almost every pilot on how stupid one can be.
But, these damn stupid things we saw surfacing the last weeks cannot be cured by regulations.
Being a gangster there is at least brainpower you can work with, but being stupid nothing helps.

The image of the wreckage is of the left hand side rear but it only amounts to less than half the length of the aircraft. Seems odd that there is no sign of the rest of the fuselage. Surely it cannot be far away ? Correction, the rest of the aircraft is there attached to the wreckage we see but it was not included in the rov image.... am I right this time?

I have assumed that photo was selected to show the aircraft registration. There are undoubtedly many other images of a more 'technical' nature that would be of less interest to the general public.

I agree with ChickenHouse regulation generally makes flying more expensive. More expensive means less hours, less practice and more danger. Regulation is not always the answer. Enforcement of existing regulations MIGHT help but in the end, most pilots exercise good judgment most of the time hence the GA accident rate in the UK at least is impressively low. It seems that a series of bad judgments led to that aircraft/ pilot / passenger being in the air when conditions weren't conducive to a successful outcome for whatever reason. It's very sad but had this been a car accident, everyone would have moved on whether or not the driver was a professional.
Yes, this should have been conducted by a professional pilot in an aircraft operating under an AOC. But poor judgment kicked in and that can never be legislated for.
I don't see much murky or opaque about GA regulation and I think suggesting as much is very lazy indeed.

To wish the standards of road dangers on the aviation industry would be something of a backwards step in my opinion.

For example in UK -

In the year 2017/18 144 people died in workplace accidents.[1]

It is estimated that in 2012 1,000 people die in road accidents each year while at work.[2]

For reasons unknown we do not include road deaths as workplace deaths.

We demand that the workplace be as safe as practicable however we do not make such demands on the roads. I believe there have been pressures to include At Work road deaths as Work Related deaths which would mean that road deaths at work might be investigated by the HSE. This has been resisted by the voters since as alluded to by the @ShropshirePilot we are happy enough to accept road deaths as a cost of doing business.

[1] http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/pdf/fatalinjuries.pdf

[2] https://worksmart.org.uk/health-advi...e-killed-while

More regulations are not going to prevent this as this was not operated as a commercial operation from the outset .
Some individual(s) decided to bend the rules, putting stronger rules in place would only penalize those of us following them .

Thus, clearly, what's needed is more enforcement, something the CAA has always been notably ineffective at. They regulate us honest properly licenced operators almost to death but despite the long-known problen of illegal commercial work going on nothing seems to be done about it, and certainly nothing proactive.
That needs to change - big time.

Absolutely right. The real questions here are around the enforcement of regulation. Should the CAA (and DGAC) regulate with a heavier hand? More ramp checks along the lines of the FAA?

We might want to be careful what we wish for.

I'm not suggesting that we adopt the same approach to aviation as to road safety - quite the opposite in fact - but the fact that globally every single GA crash is deemed newsworthy suggests to me that this activity, when carried out sensibly, is actually very safe indeed but that the general public (and my brother in law especially!!) think that he takes his life in his hands when flying GA. We are still all more likely to cop it on the way to the airfield!

Sadly you are ignoring the fact that compared to the number of people who travel on the roads and the number of fatalities when set against the much fewer people who do GA and their accident rate then you are indeed at a very much higher risk in GA.
I recall hearing a figure of 7 times a while back though I think that was in the field of leisure GA rather than commercial GA travel. Incidentally the most dangerous possible leisure activity you can do is horse riding.

It's the same erroneous perception made about how dangerous motorways and dual carriageways are. Yet due to the huge traffic flows on them their accident rate per vehicle mile traveled is very low. Near to me two single carriage A roads were identified in an Euro study of being of the most dangerous in the UK: they did not have much traffic on them yet manage to accumulate huge number of fatalities. Yet in the local news all we hear (after some gargantuan pile up) is how we desperately need updates to a major dual carriage A road in the area as it is so dangerous.......errr no it is not.

Well said - too many 'thought police' , and yet frequently comment themselves :)
It's in our DNA to question , learn and advance

I still find it bizarre that the AAIB have decided not to recover the aircraft.

Yes it is curious.Makes me wonder whether photo /video imagery from a ROV is sufficient to arrive at a conclusion for the cause or whether the costs involved in raising the wreckage may not be in the public interest, given that a light aircraft on private flight is involved. After all the large scale news and media coverage of this story perhaps is sufficient to have raised public awareness of travel by such means of air transport. I`d imagine in the future before some unwitting member of the public is about to board such a flight he/she or they or some other person concerned with theirs, their own, their business or their families, may ask a few pertinent questions about the flight . Unless of course they have a well developed sense of adventure, and as must be said there could be no adventure without risk. And that depends on how much adrenaline is required for the particular person with the habit.

And was precisely the reason behind setting up this forum in the first place.