You can't fully believe the news reports in a situation like this. The investigators will get to the bottom of the root cause of the crash. However, based on the video of the eyewitness who claimed the helicopter sounded like he was flying low and slow in the clouds, I could envision the pilot trying to gently descend and see if he could break out and land somewhere. He would have a radar altimeter that would tell him his altitude above the ground. However, he would also know he was flying in the vicinity of alot of tall hills or mountains. This is an emergency situation. Perhaps there will be some recorded radio communications that will shed light on the situation. A pilot is taught to fly the aircraft first, and talk second, so he may not have said anything he was so busy concentrating on flying the aircraft. Unless the helicopter was equipped with an automatic flight/hover control, this would be extremely difficult to accomplish. It could be vertigo inducing. I could envision the pilot then making the decision to climb and gain airspeed to break out on top of the layer, assuming there was a layer, and if radar showed him at 2400 feet, and an airspeed of 160 kts, he may have eventually succumbed to vertigo and lost control of level flight. Vertigo is a big killer of pilots. It is a condition of the inner ear that sends false sensations that conflict with what your instruments are telling you. From 2400 feet he would have plenty of altitude to go into a nose down dive that could quickly reach 160 knots. Everything will just be guess work and conjecture until the mishap report comes out about a year from now. In the meantime, the lawyers for the victim's families will be line up to get a piece of the action.
