Chaotic Neutral wrote:What does "loss of awareness" mean? Alarms go off and the plane automatically moves upward if it goes too low, right?
Loss of awareness is any time you don't really know what's going on. It could mean getting lost, it could mean spatial disorientation. On top of that arctic regions are prone to weather conditions that can cause people standing on the ground walking around to become severely disoriented due to a lack of details - basically, land and sky become the same color with no real distinctive landmarks. Bad enough on the ground (where it has led to people getting lost and dying from exposure), but in the air it can be far worse, with a loss of altitude awareness leading to problems like controlled flight into terrain (CFIT). He was also flying at night over a national park, which means little or no lights on the ground, and if overcast no lights from above. Flying like that, you might as well have a windshield painted over in black.
Of course, raptor pilots are trained on flying on instruments.
In theory a well-trained pilot need not look outside the cockpit at all. In practice, instruments sometimes malfunction, and at night over wilderness, depending on weather perhaps no outside cues... well, it's bad. There have been times pilots elected to bail out of functional airplanes with failed instruments rather than to keep flying, particularly in mountainous areas.
Or there was some mechanical failure of the airplane. We just don't know.
Um... can I hasten to say
that is purely speculation of POSSIBLE causes, not in any way to be taken as a definitive statement of fact as we just don't have the facts here. We have no idea what happened to that pilot. It does not appear to be CFIT. Other than that, no one (yet) knows what happened.
