Discussed it today over lunch after flying. He flew right down runway 8, the wind was calm and he could have landed but maybe read 26 is the designated calm wind runway? Once he passed the shore the lake is a big black hole. Tough flying for someone that has only had their ppl for 5 months. His mother was waiting at the airport. Awful stuff.
Argh, that's terrible. He was probably afraid to do a straight in because some people don't like them, sad. 26 is the designated calm runway, but 26 has a left pattern which brings you up against a good sized mountain and close to a large hill on base. It was changed to a right pattern a couple year back, which is not near terrain, but some vocal pilots apparently didn't like that and it went back to left, I guess some people struggle with right pattern turns. If I had been doing that flight, I would have come straight into 8 and been done with it.
Maybe there was someone in the pattern when he was coming in, but I tend to doubt it. There are a lot of things to unpack here. A new pilot flying north into a great wilderness in the dark is just not a good idea IMO. Smoke was probably a factor, it doesn't show up in metars, the day I flew (2 days before) all the stations nearby were reporting vis at 10 sky clear, they weren't picking up the smoke. You had to dig into the forecast discussion to find a comment about smoke in the TAFs. In the air above a few thousand agl, it was IMC, barely had ground contact looking straight down. At pattern altitude it was pretty heavy haze, although viz was about 10 miles. Probably similar on Saturday, but more pronounced in the dark.
I've had good instructors, who gave me big admonitions to take flying in baby steps as I was gaining experience. That was good advice.
I hope the NTSB can shed some light on what happened. RIP
