My cheap .02 pesos? With all due respect to friends of the deceased as I don't know the people involved and would have no reason to bash them, I think the proposition of acting as a safety pilot from the right seat of these craptastic left-seat oriented six pack airplanes in the soup, proved fatal. Comanche 180? I can only imagine the hodgepodge instrumentation they had to deal with. I bet a steak dinner the right seater didn't have field-of-view-aligned flight attitude instruments.
I don't remember the last time I did instrument instruction in actual behind a parallax-laden cross-cockpit mess of an instrument setup. At work, I'm sitting in tandem with my student and thus have access to my own personal ADHRS-based EFIS. I like it that way.
I reckon most recreational CFIs would auger it in if you threw one distraction in actual while trying to get such an aircraft down safely while partial panel, after a student almost invariably aggravates your day with the typical student-created unusual attitude you let them develop (after all, they can't learn if you don't let them put you in danger right? /sarcasm). The fact the CFI was quiet as could be tells me he was chin deep behind the instrument cross-check, trying for all his life to get his bearings while looking cross cockpit. Horrible horrible position to be in. I don't put myself in that position anymore. You either give me dead-center flight attitude instrumentation to my field of view, with a second AI, or I don't go up with a student in actual. I no longer have anything to prove and frankly, the job doesn't pay enough in the civilian side for such troubles.
Perhaps a bit conservative, but hey at least I'm not in the ranks of the dead due to spatial-D precipitated loss of control. To each their own.
I do not think there was a conspiracy to throw off ATC by purposely feigning a smoke in cockpit call because someone was trying to save face. The two unfortunate souls were fatally behind the airplane in this particular flight. IMC is no child's play folks. Automation continues to lull people into dismissing IMC. IMC doesn't care about experience level either. It will kill you the one time you're not on your A game and your automation betrays you or systems failure suck your situational awareness. Tying one hand on top of that (sitting cross cockpit to primary instrumentation) is just fuel to the fire.
