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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There’s a phenomenon called the [Graveyard Spiral](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_spiral) that is a high risk when flying without visual cues – eg in fog.
The gist is that without instruments (equipment that tells the pilot how level the aircraft is on all axis and which direction it’s going in) and knowing how to use them (harder than it sounds) it is very easy to end up going in a curve, but you don’t realize because the plane/helicopter is at an angle and the centripetal forces from its circular motion make you feel like you’re still vertical. This can very quickly deteriorate to put catastrophic forces on an aircraft with the pilot not knowing until it’s too late to do anything about it.
Even very experienced pilots are susceptible to this without instruments to tell them what’s happening – with pilots in fog entering one of these spirals within 10-20 seconds of losing visual cues/instruments being turned off.
Flying by helicopter is also hard at the best of times, seriously compounding the issue.
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