You know Tim, I don't want to get in the middle of this, but thinking about eman's initial response to my comment, he is right. I know I tend to look at the world through our my prism which usually is based on what I'm doing at the time. I assume other's do the same.
When I said, "superior flying skills wouldn't have saved them", I was thinking in the mentality of someone who flies Cirrus, where the chute is the obvious choice. Eman read that comment, I'm pretty sure he doesn't fly with a chute, and read, correctly I might add, that I was saying if the Cirrus didn't have the chute, then they had no other option but to die. So effectively I was saying someone without a chute had no chance, which obviously isn't true. If I put myself in eman's shoes, not that I would try, but let's just say I did, I'd read that statement and say to myself, "what a minute, I don't have a chute, and if I'm ever in that situation, I'll fly it to the ground if at all possible and it may have been possible in this case." I was effectively telling pilots without chutes that they were dead in that situation, not what I meant, and definitely not true.
So anyway, I shouldn't have written it the way I did, obviously there was a chance that the Cirrus could have been flown to a landing after that impact, at least with the limited info we have now.
Sometimes we need to cut each other some slack, I could see where my comment could be controversial, and I apologize for that.