If in reference to the news losing it's mind, cool beans.
If in reference to a pilot losing his life, poor form, IMO.
The guy who died, from what I've learned, was an accomplished corporate pilot with rotorcraft and fixed wing time, and had his Certified Flight Instructor cert as of last year sometime. Nobody can figure out WTH happened. He clearly took off in some real soup, but the ship he was in was (again, from what I've been told) IFR certified. I HAVEN'T yet learned if the guy was IFR rated, and if he was, was he current at all. Instrument flying is an ENTIRELY different animal than regular flying. It's very complex, has a high workload for the pilot, and is challenging enough in the training environment. Actual IFR is a humbling experience until you're highly experience and comfortable with it, something that doesn't happen all too often in helicopters outside of a few sectors of the industry (EMS flying being one of the bigger ones). Most of us are VFR, "seat of the pants" guys, flying with our eyes outside of the cockpit for the vast majority of our flying time, looking for traffic and doing our jobs.
How or why this happened is a mystery to everyone so far. A number of folks in heli groups on Facebook are baffled at what took place. Maybe the guy had get-home-itis. Maybe he was IFR rated, but not comfortable with it and couldn't "commit" to going actual. Nobody knows whether he had clearing into the TFR that restricted air traffic in that area. All we know is he stated he had a problem, but whether or not he declared an emergency is unclear yet at this time as well.
What it boils down to is, flying is hazardous, and instrument flying is a challenging and perishable skill. Unless he was having a malfunction of some kind (control systems, instruments, whatever), then clearly mistakes were made, which happens more often than it should, unfortunately. But a pilot realized he was in trouble, probably made a few errors in judgement, but was able to get the ship down somewhere without causing anyone aside from himself to be injured or killed. It's a loss no matter how you look at it.
Also, while I don't watch the news, whoever Shepard Smith is needs to put up or shut up. Somebody needs to take him up, give him the controls, and tell him good luck getting on the ground by himself. If he can't do that, he needs to shut the hell up. Too many talking heads spewing crap about a million different topics that they have NO experience with, and it makes them look like the fools they are. I'm sick of it, personally.
We are diminished.
