Bonanza A36 - Harlan KY - 3 Nov 22

[PeterNSteinmetz]

So easy to mess up in IMC. Not having a flight plan and all lighting at the airport inop certainly doesn’t help. You do have to wonder what he was thinking. Maybe had just done the flight too many times.

An accident waiting to happen? : Air Facts Journal

There are some predictions I wish hadn’t come true. This is one of them. I didn’t know the guy personally, but I vicariously knew his airplane. It was an A36 Bonanza, and the way I got to know it was that any day I happened to look at what was going on at Downtown Island Airport in Knoxville, it...

airfactsjournal.com

 

[tawood]

The story reminds me of a case that occurred near me. Witnesses said the guy, a non-instrument rated pilot, had been flying/filing IFR for years, letting the autopilot do the flying. It caught up with him when the ceilings were too low at his home airport. I wonder if he didn't know/didn't consider an alternate, because many airports around the crash were better ceiling-wise:

Piper PA-24-250 Comanche, N8347P: Fatal accident occurred January 02, 2021 in New Hudson, Oakland County, Michigan

Michele, Dawson and David Compo This is preliminary information, subject to change, and may contain errors. Any errors in this report will...

www.kathrynsreport.com

Businessman, wife, son die after plane crashes into Lyon Township home

Plane owner David S. Compo — an experienced, licensed pilot — his wife Michele and their college-age son Dawson were killed in the crash

www.detroitnews.com

I guess it is to be expected, but I always find it interesting how friends/family all state that he was some kind of awesome pilot. Being local, I know of several pilots that new him, yet those pilots called him ridiculously reckless, and tried warning him and even his wife.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Witnesses said the guy, a non-instrument rated pilot, had been flying/filing IFR for years, letting the autopilot do the flying. It caught up with him when the ceilings were too low at his home airport.

It is sort of incredible to me that people do this. Likely a combination of a sense of invulnerability and a willingness to take risks. Entrepreneurs often have those traits. And then normalization of deviance. A real pity no one was able to get through to him.

 

[Winthrop]

It is sort of incredible to me that people do this.

Not really, I would actually think it is fairly common. I am actually more interested that you are not making the argument that it is not inherently dangerous.

 

[tawood]

Not really, I would actually think it is fairly common. I am actually more interested that you are not making the argument that it is not inherently dangerous.

Peter can answer for himself, but isn't it also obvious from his statements that he finds it inherently dangerous? Or are you saying that it is not?

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Not really, I would actually think it is fairly common. I am actually more interested that you are not making the argument that it is not inherently dangerous.

Oh, I think that flying around in IMC without the training which an instrument rating entails is inherently quite dangerous. Your odds of becoming dis-oriented in the soup are then quite a bit higher.

Also not checking the NOTAMs and finding out that the approach was NOTAM'ed unavailable is dangerous.

VFR into IMC is one of the leading causes of fatalities. I do understand how people get drawn into it gradually when flying in VMC and things gradually worsen. In this case it was a very deliberate decision to fly in there.

 

[MuseChaser]

Not really, I would actually think it is fairly common. I am actually more interested that you are not making the argument that it is not inherently dangerous.

I am NOT defending the actions of a non-instrument-rated pilot filing and flying IFR... just to make that perfectly clear. Also, I'm a little unclear about what Winthrop is getting at with the quoted comment, but if my interpretation is correct (along the lines of, paraphrasing and interpreting some things Peter has written along the lines of "lots of things the FAA does to 'keep us safe' don't really accomplish that, but definitely make life harder on us"), then perhaps one could make the reasoned statement that a rating does not equal competency (we ALL know pilots who probably shouldn't be flying, despite the fact that they at one time passed the practical and do the bare minimum to maintain "currency"), and that the inverse situation is also more than plausible; there could quite possibly be some very competent folks who, for whatever reasons, never went for the checkride but gained a high level of competency and experience either through training up to the checkride or a lot of time spent with highly competent IFR-rated friends.

Yes, that latter is certainly not the norm, but I one could certainly make the case that flying without a rating isn't inherently dangerous. Flying without the necessary skills is. In an ideal world, ratings and currency would be a 100% equivalent to competency, and competency would only exist within that subset. The world ain't ideal.

Again, however, just to make sure I'm not misunderstood.. I am not, in any way, justifying or advocating for what this pilot did. It is NOT justifiable, for any reason.