Op-Ed: To understand the Kobe Bryant crash, it helps to know what it's like to fly in iffy weather (via latimesopinion)
The accident that took the lives of Kobe and Gianna Bryant and seven others must have seemed to most people an improbable, freakish event. To me, what was most surprising about it was its ordinariness.
The scenario is a common one. In bad weather, a pilot with the proper qualifications would normally file an instrument flight plan, and could then fly through clouds by reference to instruments alone. But some pilots aren’t instrument qualified, and some who are may simply choose to stay below the clouds, as Ara Zobayan, the instrument-rated pilot of Bryant’s helicopter, did.
Gradually, they may begin to accept downward visibility in place of forward visibility. Flying low, as helicopters often do, they can see the ground below even when they can barely make out what’s straight ahead. People watching from below see them pass overhead and vanish into cloud; but the pilots can still see the ground, and they think to themselves, “So far, so good.
Various explanations — all, at this point, hypothetical — come to mind. Some sort of mechanical or instrument failure is possible, but it’s extremely improbable that it would happen to occur at the very moment that the helicopter pulled up into the clouds. Or Zobayan could have suffered some sort of incapacitating medical event like a stroke or aneurism.
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