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People's Perceptions about airplane accident

I took for granted that non-pilots had an understanding of the weather conditions on October 11, 2021. They were this: Surface winds out of the South, 10 to 20 knots; broken and overcast ceilings ranging from 1,700 to 3,000 feet above ground level; cloud tops from 3,000 to 5,000 feet. Anyone flying cross country would most likely be passing through cloud layers and therefor require instrument approaches to land. Critical phases of flight would be spent in the clouds, meaning the pilot has no visiblity outside the aircraft and has to rely on his instruments to manage course, speed, altitude, and attitude. All these measurements are critical to the safe traversal while flying under Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC).

A man behind me at the local grocery store checkout line hears me respond to the cashier's inquery as to why I'm buying a couple of boquets of flowers. My response was, "One was for my wife and one was for the vigil tonight at 7 PM." He chimed in an said, "I don't understand why he just didn't aim for a field or a road or something away from the houses. Why didn't he look at the ground for orientation?"

It took me a second to process his assumptions and to construct a response.

I said, "He was flying in the clouds when he became disoriented. He had no reference to the ground because it wasn't visible until the last few seconds. He was flying power towards it in a 90 degress bank, nose down attitude. No margin to recover".

Of course, I didn't get into the reasons why he ended up the way he did. That's still speculation on anyones part. Lots of questions to ask about it.

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