[mdip]

Wow, that's incredible. Goes to show that people do walk away from plane crashes with some regularity. My father was a pilot[0].

He sold his plane about 15 years ago (to a group of owners, one of which was a priest, I'm sure there's a joke in there). A few of winters later, he was called out to Romeo Airport; the pilot flying the plane that was formerly his had crashed the aircraft a few miles short of the runway in bad weather[1]. He was traveling with his daughter, a friend and, I think, his wife. He died, but his daughter was able to get free and make her way to a nearby farm to call for help. Looking at the plane, the fact that anyone survived at all let alone walked to a nearby house with minor injuries is pretty miraculous.

It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite. I have no idea the kinds of structural technologies are involved in the aircraft but I know his plane was made in the 70s and was light enough that he only had a pole which attached to the front landing gear to pull it out of the hangar. The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted.

[0] I'll spare the details as I have left many comments in the past about his experiences.

[1] https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/43894 - "Pilot Error"; I recall my Dad saying "all plane crashes are pilot error"

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-32_Cherokee_Six

[throwaway0a5e]

> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults. I remember being shocked that they had to weigh the paint they applied when he had the plane re-painted.

I used to work in general aviation. If my eyes could fly a loop in my skull they would have.

Were the occupants required to use the bathroom before flying? That's how much weight you're potentially saving by weighing the paint on a small aircraft.

They make you weigh the paint because they want you to spray on a certain thickness so they say "X oz paint, Y oz thinner/hardener" (or something like that) in order to get your mixture into the right ballpark so it will work with whatever procedure they want you to spray it on with and get the thickness/finish/hardness the OEM wants you to get.

In aviation there's a ton of treating simple systems as black boxes and "do X and exactly X" type maintenance that happens in order to smoothly transfer liability. You paint a cowl the way the OEM says not because you couldn't get an equivalently performing cowl a different way but because you don't want the NTSB coming after you trying to determine if you did it different but right or different but wrong.

The specifications to which general aviation stuff is done isn't really any more exacting than stuff in automotive or heavy industry. The service literature is just more verbose and the service procedures are more tightly defined.

[throwaway330935]

>in order to get your mixture into the right ballpark

This makes perfect sense. I'm using a kitchen scale to measure the 2-part silicone mixture that I'm using for making toys, not because weight is critical but because it needs to be right for curing. I should do similar when mixing epoxy, but I always eyeball that for some reason. Maybe has to do with cost, it's $10-20 worth of silicone I'm mixing, and usually a quarter worth of epoxy, just due to quantities involved.

[ryandrake]

I'm building an experimental, and we tend to re-do weight and balance after painting. An elaborate paint job can add 30+ pounds and can shift your CG rearward. The regs don't require it, but many builders do it anyway.

[mdip]

Very interesting. I remember thinking it was positively "nuts", but then when you're in the aircraft being slapped around by the breeze, it starts to click.

[officeplant]

>The specifications to which general aviation stuff is done isn't really any more exacting than stuff in automotive or heavy industry. The service literature is just more verbose and the service procedures are more tightly defined.

This reminds me of how often I quote weight limits on cars to people and their eyes go wide at how easy it is to exceed the OEM's recommended limits. I'm fairly sure I'm one of the few among my friend groups that has read through every owners manual for the cars/vans I've owned.

[marvin]

I know that glider maintenance procedures in my country call for redoing the center of gravity measurents after painting. Might have been related?

[inoffensivename]

In the US, the FAA requires recalculation of the weight and balance unless the change is "negligible", which AC 43.13-1B defines as "any change of one pound or less for aircraft whose weight empty is less than 5,000 pounds".

I think the commenter was making the point that the weight of the paint is not a significant consideration, not that recalculating the weight and balance after a paint job should not be done.

[labcomputer]

Well... ok, but you usually still need to weigh and check the balance of the control surfaces after painting to ensure that they aren't going to flutter at less than Vmc (post-paint control surface balancing is often explicitly called out in the maintenance manual).

Painting a plane is one of those times that you often strip everything out anyway, so it's a convenient time to check the weight and balance against the logbook.

[BashiBazouk]

I once witnessed an airplane crash that everyone survived. I was a preteen hanging around outside the Scotts Valley roller rink with a friend in the early eighties. The roller rink is next to the now defunct airfield. The airfield was lower than the rink by an embankment. We had recently been watching Jaws on Betamax and my most persistent memory is seeing only the tail crossing the field. It reminded me of a shark fin moving through the water, as the embankment was high enough that I could not see the body of the plane. Then bam, the plane hit the embankment right in front of me, caught air then crashed nose down. I think the plane was a Piper but my knowledge of small craft is limited. It was definitely a wing under. My friend ran to get his father and we all ran over to the wreck. My friend's father opened the doors and everyone but the pilot was able to get out by themselves. The pilot had hit his head on something and his face was covered in blood but alive. I found out from press reports later that was the only time I "met" Steve Wozniak.

Edit: just looked it up. The plane was a Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC.

[ZeljkoS]

https://www.cultofmac.com/465778/today-in-apple-history-stev...

[DiggyJohnson]

Thanks for sharing this story. Well structured, great ending.

[qayxc]

> The weight is so critical that the 7-seat plane can realistically only seat 4-5 adults.

I think you overlooked an important factor there. The plane was indeed designed to realistically seat 7 adults.

The issue is that in the 50 years since the plane was originally designed, the average weight of adults (in the US) increased by about 18% [0] and the average adult woman today weighs as much as the average adult man in the 1960s.

[0] https://www.newsmax.com/US/average-weight-man-woman-obese/20...

[sokoloff]

I find it very hard to agree that a PA-32 was "designed to realistically seat 7 adults". I don't think they even imagined 6 adults as a typical cabin load, but rather a max of 4 adults and 2 kids and a typical of 2 adults and 2-4 kids. It is one of the more roomy cabins among light singles, but every one of them that I see for listed for sale right now is configured with seating for only 6, which is great for 2 adults and a few kids.

[travisjungroth]

The point of the person you're replying to is that people have gotten bigger, which is a fact. Pointing out the comfort of levels of people in airplanes today doesn't dispute that.

It used to be more common to have a flexible combination of seats/baggage/fuel. But pilots flip out (or crash) if they can't fill the tanks, every seat and the baggage compartment and come in under gross. So the same airplanes often don't have the "bonus seats" they used to.

Numbers from Wikipedia, from the 1972 PA-32 owners handbook:

3,400 lb gross - 1,788 empty - (4 hours * 15gph * 6 lbs) / 7 passengers = 178 lbs per passenger. The average adult in the 70s was about 160. So you're not going across the country, but you could safely do a day trip with a 90 minute flight each way.

Now the average adult is 180. And they're a little taller than they were in the 70s, but not much. So every passenger has an extra 20 pounds horizontally. So in 2021, you'd be just over gross except that the people can't actually fit in the airplane.

[sokoloff]

Have you ever seen the optional 7th seat for a PA-32? It makes for 3-across in the back row which makes the backseat of a 911 look positively roomy.

[travisjungroth]

I just looked at photos. Yes, it's very small.

Here's a Piper ad from 1966 with seven adults and their bags: https://i.imgur.com/fWyArRH.png

"The SIX will carry up to seven adults and their luggage - in real comfort"

And here's an ad from 1969 with six adults in it (and some rifles. a different time!) https://i.imgur.com/kGMrENf.png

I can't read into the minds of the engineers who made the airplane. Maybe it's true "I don't think they even imagined 6 adults as a typical cabin load". But we can see that the marketing department at least tried to make people think it was.

[lisper]

The useful load of a PA-32 is about 1500 lbs, so yes, you can put 7 180-lb adults in it and still have a little margin. What you cannot do is carry 7 adults plus their bags plus full fuel. Even without bags, you could not go very far with a full plane.

Some planes have more margin: the Cessna 182 for example is a four-seater and can carry full fuel plus 800 lbs, so you really can load it up with four people plus bags and still go somewhere.

But all planes will be close to their operating limits when fully loaded. Even a jetliner will typically be very close to its operating limits on takeoff and pilots have to pay very close attention to this. If you think about it, this has to be the case. If it weren't, the plane would have been over-designed and much more expensive than it has to be, and so it would lose to the competition.

[_ea1k]

Yeah, its 7 seats in the same sense as the Tesla Model Y can be a 7 seater. Its technically true, but really only true if some of those people are small.

Even with FAA standard people it would be small for 7.

[mdip]

You're probably right -- I likely have the number wrong. In fact, I was able to find the craft in a database online (still reporting my Dad's corporation as the owner, so it's not perfect) and it indicated 6.

I recall him saying 7, but that was a few decades ago (the plane was destroyed by its new owners in 2006, and I hadn't flown in it since a few years prior to that). :)

[mdip]

Not so much overlooked as omitted ... I had originally written "average American adults" but I didn't want to distract into the territory of "how bad our diets are in this country".

My Dad almost always flew alone. So much so that when the plane was packed and we were making an approach into the Sandusky, OH airport, we had a sudden "dip" on the way down that everyone noticed (we were headed to Cedar Pointe, so it was preparation, I guess). My Dad explained that he wasn't used to landing with so much weight and hadn't adjusted the trim correctly[0].

[0] If it wasn't abundantly clear, all of my flying experience ended at about age 17, which was a while ago, and I was never a pilot, so to the extent that I get any of this wrong -- that's why :)

[mnw21cam]

There's also the fact that an aircraft like that may be able to carry 7 adults in some conditions. If you're at sea level in cold dry weather[0], then you'll have a lot more performance available than if you're trying to take off from Denver airport on a hot summer day just after a load of rain. There have been (usually light) aircraft that have crashed on takeoff/landing because the pilot didn't take the hot day into account, the minimum flying speed was higher than they expected, and the engine performance was too low.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_altitude

[captainredbeard]

Wrong - most singles can’t fill the seats and the tanks. This is general aviation 101 folks

[boringg]

This sounds like backcountry tent sizing. 3-person tent! (Good luck fitting two people in there and anything else!)

[throwaway0a5e]

Over-sizing vehicles for the intended cargo is far more of an upscale suburb thing than a BFE thing.

[selectodude]

Apparently normal humans weighed less than 150 pounds until we discovered McDonalds.

[jeffreyrogers]

I think the average US soldier in WWII weighed less than 150. People were a little shorter then too though.

[sokoloff]

If you can fill the seats and the tanks (and be legal), I'd say someone made your tanks too small.

[kbutler]

6 * 1.18 = 7.08 people, so that could explain 1 adult.

I think the "some adults, some kids" is more significant - similar to back seats in many small cars - you can put 3 passengers in there, but 3 adults won't be happy.

[lanstin]

Nor will three rangy step-siblings.

[hirundo]

> It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite.

Years ago I was doing pilot training in a Cessna 152. A coworker of mine was a retired Navy captain and instructor at the TOPGUN program, with hundreds of carrier landings in an F-14. He looked at me like I was crazy. He said those little planes were deathtraps and he'd never go up in one again.

Not long after that I had a lesson that coincided with some turbulence from the nearby coast. The plane janked around by seemingly hundreds of feet in every direction. I was scared (almost literally) shitless, and that was my last lesson. I haven't been in a small plane since.

[mdip]

I'm glad my Dad's not flying any longer. He was doing very long (multiple stops for re-fueling, flying on some form of breathing tank[0]) trips. He can go on for hours (and we let him) about stories of how he almost didn't make it home due to X or Y[1].

And he joked that every gauge/gadget on the dashboard that didn't come with the plane was there because "if I had it when X happened, X wouldn't have happened" (...or I wouldn't have left the ground knowing the condition existed, or it would have warned me with well enough time to get to safety before I have to be met by emergency vehicles on the tarmac).

Funny enough, he would get a little uncomfortable flying commercial. I'm not sure if he was putting on a show for us kids or if he was serious but he'd say he "didn't like someone else in charge of the plane". My Dad flew GA (alone) a few times a week most weeks, so he was unusually experienced for a small plane pilot.

[0] He had a breathing apparatus that allowed him to fly at higher altitudes in the unpressurized cabin, IIRC, but I'm not a pilot.

[1] Except, when he tells it, he was never in any danger. Doesn't matter if he's hanging an arm out the window trying to manually spin the prop, "it was always under control.". Uh huh.

[davidgould]

This sounds like my dad. He was a skillful pilot but enjoyed risk too much to be a “good” pilot. Died of lymphoma 30 years ago, so it never caught up with him. He flew a lot for a private pilot, over ten thousand hours,so had a few of those stories too.

I flew with him as a child enough to have experienced some of them myself. I remember:

- An inflight electrical fire, at night, over the Sierras.

- A very tense IFR final into Monterey, at night in fog, in a twin Comanche just ahead of a Learjet when the controller had a power outage and lost radio contact.

- A test flight in a STOL Maule Rocket that ended with stalling and bouncing in the rough just short of the 7600 hundred foot runway at Stead AFB. The gear collapsed during roll out and damaged the wing and prop, but there were no injuries. Sadly, Maule went out of business and the aircraft was never repaired.

[mdip]

  > He was a skillful pilot but enjoyed risk too much to be a "good" pilot.

To the extent that anyone who is willing to fly GA enjoys too much risk, that's my Dad. But I'd say he became a uniquely skilled small plane pilot[0]. For a solid 15 years he was flying multi-leg trips weekly (regardless of weather). I've joked, in the past, that I've never actually seen my father play a game on a computer -- the only thing he's ever done that resembles a game is "Flight Simulator" which he used to train (he was IFR and weather rated if I've got those terms right).

One thing that kept me comfortable being a passenger with my Dad had little to do with his externally exhibited confidence (which was absolute, and usually reassuring to others). It was the fact that I knew how deadly seriously he took what he was doing. I watched him pull out the clip-board and perform every step on the check-list. We've been stranded overnight and missed vacations entirely because my dad decided the trip would not be safe enough.

The strangely reassuring thing, though, was my Dad's opinion of stunt pilots/air shows[1]. They make him visibly, and vocally angry. My Dad isn't one to create controversy or even one to lecture much so I was surprised when we went to a hydroplane race and they had a biplane pilot doing stunts how completely pissed off he was about it. It was years ago and I don't recall his exact reasoning, and it might have even been something specific to the aircraft involved but his opinion was that the pilot was being reckless/irresponsible, that pilot skill, alone, cannot guarantee the safety of the pilot, aircraft or spectators because they're not designed to be used that way. In anger, I remember him nearly spitting something like "I have no respect for a pilot who puts peoples lives at risk for entertainment." I was a snotty teenager at that time so I probably rolled by eyes at him. I also know that he'd never do anything like that with his plane -- he gets seriously motion sick spinning around in a circle more than once or twice. ;)

I think the biggest fear we had with my Dad, though, was him falling asleep in the air. He worked long hours and my mom often had to poke him awake on long drives. I remember discovering his cure for this was a 1,000 ct container of Atomic Fire Balls (cinnamon hard candy that "tastes like burning").

[0] The "good" being in quotes, I assume, isn't implying that he's an unskilled pilot, just willing to accept risks that can only be reduced by pilot skill, which he had plenty of, but one cannot practice/become skilled in some situations without being put into them.

[1] I'm not referring to The Blue Angels/Airforce related shows; I don't know his opinion on that because we never went as a kid -- I suspect they might be similar but he has enormous admiration for military members so I wouldn't be surprised if he drew an exception. :)

[mistrial9]

thirty foot jump as a passenger in a 4-seater here at 10,000 feet in the mountains - I hear you! :D

[rubicon33]

There is a similar story in rally car safety. In the 80s and 90s going off the road at high speeds almost certainly meant death or serious injury.

By comparison, there are some horrific crashes today that drivers are walking away from. [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/YpNdoV6xv2s

[ip26]

It's hard to impress upon folks who have never been in a small plane like that just how ... yeah ... how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite

Went up in a four man single engine chopper once. It had all the reassuring solidity of a bicycle. Never again. I can’t even imagine what the truly tiny ones are like.

[mdip]

I did one of those chopper tours over a big city one time in a splurge. Yeah, I hear ya.

I was surprised at how similar the feel is. Your bicycle analogy made me laugh -- spot on. I used to love taking my macho friends up in my dad's plane. There's this moment after take-off where my Dad will comment on "how smooth the air is" ... it's either "perspective" or a pilot joke, I'm not sure, because said "smooth air" is about as bad as reasonable air-turbulence on a jet and the flight is usually marked occasionally by the kind of turbulence that would have the overhead bins tossing luggage onto passengers. I recall a humorous incident where my buddy Tim dropped an F-bomb over a hot mic on the headset when we got smacked sideways.

[lbriner]

I had a lesson in an Ikarus C42, which although it looks like a "normal" light aircraft is made of kevlar over aluminium and is officially a microlight. It is a 2-seater but the weight is so low that if you are travelling with a passenger, there is a weight limit. I think I worked out that my 6'3" boss was too heavy to fly with an instructor.

It was actually pretty fun but, of course, the weather is everything. I can't imagine how bad it would be in any wind more than about 5 knots but on the day I had my lesson, it was calm and clear.

[AdrianB1]

In aviation load and range are always a compromise, you can fly short distance with a higher load (all passengers) or a longer distance with less passengers. The combined passenger weight and full tanks weight is always more than the Maximum Take Off Weigth (MTOW). For example the small plane that I fly the most has enough fuel capacity to fly around 2000km, but if I will the tanks I need to fly alone, there is no reserve even for a backpack. When I took my brother for a flight around the airstrip I had 20 liters of fuel in the tanks 'cause he is heavy (for an European).

I have a couple of friends that each crash landed at least twice in the past 10-15 years; one was in the hospital once, for the rest of the incidents they simply walked. In two cases it was engine failure, in one a stuck landing gear and the hospital one had an external factor.

[dehrmann]

> how much it feels like you're hanging onto a kite

The two "small" planes I've ridden in were a Cessna and an L-39. The Cessna felt like a toy, and the L-39 was a serious piece of hardware. Landings were also very different; the Cessna just got tossed around a lot more.

[sillysaurusx]

Did his wife survive?

[osenthuortuh]

The second link is the crash report. There were four occupants and only one fatality, so only he died.

Looks like he tried to land in bad weather, descended before he could see the runway, and clipped some trees. Weather is an alarmingly common cause of accidents in general aviation.

[strogonoff]

> Weather is an alarmingly common cause of accidents in general aviation.

Or—to rewind the causal chain just a little further—pilot hubris, impatience and/or ignorance, which leads to weather being a factor in the first place. The choice to wing it and hope bad weather in the area will not affect you is the pilot’s.

From my shallow study of fatal and non-fatal GA accidents, there is hardly ever such a combination of life-or-death urgency and absence of alternative transportation options besides flying that could justify risking one’s own life and lives of one’s passengers by wilfully or accidentally ignoring weather forecast, and yet too often that appears to be the case.

It’s not a pleasure to talk about incidents like that, but “all plane crashes are pilot error” strikes me as a decent framing of the situation to adopt as a pilot when considering a risky flight.

[mdip]

Without reviewing your profile, I'm just going to guess you're a pilot or you know pilots -- just from this:

  > Or—to rewind the causal chain just a little further--pilot hubris, impatience and/or ignorance, which leads to weather being a factor in the first place. The choice to wing it and hope bad weather in the area will not affect you is the pilot’s.

My Dad says "it's always pilot error" and backs them up with statements like this. And he accepts that fault on himself. These are obvious things, too -- in the case of this crash, the pilot was VFR rated and as my Dad harshly put it "had no business being where he was in that weather".

But he really meant everything is the pilots fault. I heard him explaining to someone that there's ultimately no other valid excuse. When his engine failed over Lake Michigan, it was pilot error because he didn't have the necessary instruments to detect a common engine condition that would have prevented him from taking off had he known it was happening.

I think it's a little extreme, but frankly, I want the person flying my plane to have that attitude for themselves!

[7952]

I think you would still feel guilty if passengers were hurt even if you were completely blameless. And part of your responsibility is to understand the risks. Risks that passengers may not fully understand. It is more like a risky sport like horse riding or skiing.

[mdip]

Completely agree. My thinking was simply: I know my Dad held himself to that standard. And the only way that I'd be willing to fly a plane is if I was willing to hold myself to that high of a standard, but as I'm not a pilot, I don't feel that I have enough knowledge to pass judgement on pilots (or others) who feel that there are circumstances to many crashes that should not be blamed on the pilot.

I think my Dad applied that to small plane/private pilots, rather than commercial, as well. While it might make someone with that absolutest thinking feel good to say "The pilot should have known someone's phone battery was nearing explosion before it blew a hole in the aircraft and required an emergency landing", I think my Dad would land somewhere in the territory of "If the pilot had a reasonable way of preventing the problem and didn't, it doesn't matter if it was negligence or lack of creative thinking". Me, I define that "reasonable way of preventing" as "it's in the checklist". I think my Dad would expect a whole lot more.

And even though I'd be more forgiving in my judgement of pilots, I can't fault him for his thinking. Every time something unexpected/dangerous happened in the air to him, he wouldn't get back up in the plane until he had figured out how to eliminate/greatly reduce the risk. When telling the story of what happened, he'd point out why it was his fault[1] and I don't doubt that he believed that when nobody was looking.

Over the years, he added a device to monitor the exhaust temp after the pipe blew threw the front of the aircraft and made the plane into a fireworks show of ignited exhaust. He added these strange (very inexpensive) rubber wire-like things to various parts of the wings after being struck by lightening which broke his radio, resulting in an interesting problem with getting clearance for landing[0]. He owned the plane with a partner who used it on the weekends, occasionally (they paid the company to use the plane), and they both had this same philosophy, so by the time he sold it, there were more gadgets attached to the dashboard than built into it. They had a weather radar gadget that was hypnotic to watch.

I can't think of a single incident my dad encountered in the air that would have fallen anywhere near the category of "skill-related/irresponsible failure". It was always a mechanical fault where the plane lacked any way of detecting/alerting the pilot and there was no other way for the pilot to confirm, before take-off, that the condition would not occur. And weather at Romeo airport can switch on a dime in the winter[1], which he managed with radar on his plane. Outside of the small explosion and an occasional hit from a bird, the plane was never damaged/crash landed or even had a non-runway emergency landing[2] despite losing the engine a few times and having many, many other problems.

Often these things just sat and monitored things that should never fail -- in the case of the exhaust heat, a separate fault caused the excess heat, which caused the (very small) explosion -- it should never have gotten that hot, but were it to get that hot, it didn't have to result in a fault or even an unscheduled landing. For the lightening, adding the $3 wires, apparently, eliminates the threat entirely. And despite all of the flying he did, I don't think he ever encountered the same kind of (or even related) problem more than once. That's about as perfect a score as you can get, in my opinion. :)

[0] I was told this as a kid and probably have most of it wrong, but he had these extremely bright flashlights as part of his emergency kit (strange, ABS plastic, four C-cells, not mag-lite, but these were damn bright); they were for Morse-code signalling (had both an on-off switch and a button that turned it on when depressed and off when released). He somehow had to notify the tower and receive a reply using the flashlight -- I imagined he flew the plane past the windows like in the movies, but it was probably less dramatic.

[1] He frequently ended up landing/having to get a ride from Oakland County International because of weather he wasn't willing to land in -- I don't know how the licensing works with that, but after he got his IFR but before he got the remaining (something related to a Loran-C and weather), he'd enter his flight plan and find out he wasn't allowed to fly due to weather. That stopped after he "leveled up his license a few times" over an expensive 3-year period.

[2] The closest he was to that would have been nearly having to do an emergency landing at Selfridge ANG. This was the early 90s, so who knows what this looks like today (and my recollection is lacking) -- IIRC, it would have been illegal for him to land there, but in an emergency, they'll accommodate. I remember him saying something about losing his license/having it suspended had he done it but I don't know the details.

[wingspar]

Another famous case of bad judgement resulting is JFK Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_Jr._plane_cras...

[organsnyder]

I have a friend that is a commercial pilot for small jets, and until recently taught general aviation. He says that the overwhelming majority of GA accidents are poor planning: skipping items on the checklist, flying in inappropriate conditions, etc.

[mdip]

So the "details" are a little off. There wasn't rain, it was an outright winter storm. The pilot was VFR and should not have been flying in that weather.

I don't know what the characteristics are of that airport but I've been in the plane during a really touchy landing in bad snow, before. The occupants described that "everything seemed fine", they were coming out of the clouds and expecting to see the runway up ahead, but instead found tree-tops.

In the case of landing with my Dad in similar weather, the clouds were very low, he had no visual and was reaching the point where he'd have to put it down or abort the landing[0] when he suddenly flung the clipboard at my mom's lap and grabbed onto the yoke.

We were on the ground in a few tense seconds and I've never seen my Dad jump like that -- it seriously freaked me the hell out. His explanation was that he had already decided to abort the landing when the clouds broke and he realized he was in a good position to put it down. I get the impression that he was a little surprised about the position he was actually in -- and it was an uncharacteristically violent landing.

[0] I'm not sure what the technical details are or if I am getting that right...

[jrockway]

> Weather is an alarmingly common cause of accidents in general aviation.

Well, flying VFR into IMC anyway.

[karlkatzke]

Yes, those cumulogranite clouds are dangerous.