If the sky was clear, as the article states, then lack of GPS is not a good enough excuse for a trained pilot to crash into a mountain, unless the cockpit has no windows.
It's not fun to lose GPS, but, a trained pilot ought to have been able to handle this situation fine. All instruments can fail, but weather notwithstanding, no instruments are required to land a plane back down on a runway (implied in my statement is that, if you lose all your instruments, you should still try to land rather than continue your flight).
At the end of the day, if you aren't proficient in VFR, then your IFR proficiency doesn't mean much. Hopefully this pushes the relevant flight schools to do more training, because this crash appears highly avoidable - and while the pilots take some amount of blame since they are behind the controls, there are also people who failed them by not giving them sufficient training.
I thought this at first, but then read farther and realized the flight started at 11pm on a moonless night. An unlit mountain is hard to see at night.
That's valid. I wouldn't call that a clear sky, personally, but I suppose it can still be considered one.
This is a real issue, where conditions that are legally considered sufficiently clear for visual flying aren't necessarily safe for it. A famous example is JFK Jr. He was flying over water on a hazy night with poor illumination without an instrument rating. This was considered clear and was perfectly legal, but he got disoriented and crashed into the ocean.
It's hammered into pilots that safe and legal are two different things, and you must evaluate whether the conditions are something that you can actually handle safely, not merely whether you're legal to fly in them.
> If the sky was clear, as the article states, then lack of GPS is not a good enough excuse for a trained pilot to crash into a mountain, unless the cockpit has no windows.
I have thousands of hours as pilot in command and have worked as a professional pilot.
Unlit terrain is invisible at night. The moon was new. They did not see, and could not have seen, the mountains.