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Kobe Bryant's helicopter crash

His last instrument check ride was in May of 2019 (about 7 months prior). Of course any instrument pilot will wonder why he wasn't able to maintain control given he had and instrument rating and was an instrument instructor.

It can happen to the best of us. He was unprepared, struggling to maintain visual reference, probably rushed. And he made a fatal mistake.
 
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There was a photo in the report from a fire watch camera (from a hill above the cloud layer) and from that they estimated the cloud tops were about 2400'. The flight data suggested they climbed to about 2300'. So close ... maybe some visual effect/illusion near the cloud tops as the sun started to get through led the pilot to visually chase a false horizon and things went completely wrong from there? :-(
 
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Sadly it sounds like what many of us assumed from the get-go.

It's going to be impossible to know exactly what lead to the pilot's bad decision making but it goes to show how most crashes aren't one singular catastrophic event. Several "events/decisions" lead up to the crash.
 

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