I can understand how low visibility will cause a crash during landing or take off. I can also understand how it could lead to collisions with tall structures like masts and trees. However, in many of these cases it doesn’t seem like they collided with anything. They seem to drop out of the sky “due to low visibility”.
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When you’re walking around you’ve got a bunch of different systems in your body working to keep you upright and heading in the right direction, and without you even thinking about it. The two big ones are your eyes and something called the vestibular system, a couple of fluid filled loops in your ears that act like gyroscopes.
On a clear day you can rely on your eyes. When you can’t use your eyes, unless you have quite a bit of training, your vestibular system will try to take over for you.
But that system isn’t adapted to working when you’re in a vehicle, so it’s very easily tricked into giving you bad information. Like it will tell you you’re flying straight and level when you’re actually flying in a circle, and slowly descending into the ground (they call that one the graveyard spiral if you want to look it up).
And, because it’s built in, and you use it all day long without thinking about it, it’s *very* hard to ignore it, even when it’s lying to you, so you crash.
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