Looks like he tried to land in bad weather, descended before he could see the runway, and clipped some trees. Weather is an alarmingly common cause of accidents in general aviation.
Or—to rewind the causal chain just a little further—pilot hubris, impatience and/or ignorance, which leads to weather being a factor in the first place. The choice to wing it and hope bad weather in the area will not affect you is the pilot’s.
From my shallow study of fatal and non-fatal GA accidents, there is hardly ever such a combination of life-or-death urgency and absence of alternative transportation options besides flying that could justify risking one’s own life and lives of one’s passengers by wilfully or accidentally ignoring weather forecast, and yet too often that appears to be the case.
It’s not a pleasure to talk about incidents like that, but “all plane crashes are pilot error” strikes me as a decent framing of the situation to adopt as a pilot when considering a risky flight.
> Or—to rewind the causal chain just a little further--pilot hubris, impatience and/or ignorance, which leads to weather being a factor in the first place. The choice to wing it and hope bad weather in the area will not affect you is the pilot’s.
But he really meant everything is the pilots fault. I heard him explaining to someone that there's ultimately no other valid excuse. When his engine failed over Lake Michigan, it was pilot error because he didn't have the necessary instruments to detect a common engine condition that would have prevented him from taking off had he known it was happening.
I think it's a little extreme, but frankly, I want the person flying my plane to have that attitude for themselves!
I don't know what the characteristics are of that airport but I've been in the plane during a really touchy landing in bad snow, before. The occupants described that "everything seemed fine", they were coming out of the clouds and expecting to see the runway up ahead, but instead found tree-tops.
In the case of landing with my Dad in similar weather, the clouds were very low, he had no visual and was reaching the point where he'd have to put it down or abort the landing[0] when he suddenly flung the clipboard at my mom's lap and grabbed onto the yoke.
We were on the ground in a few tense seconds and I've never seen my Dad jump like that -- it seriously freaked me the hell out. His explanation was that he had already decided to abort the landing when the clouds broke and he realized he was in a good position to put it down. I get the impression that he was a little surprised about the position he was actually in -- and it was an uncharacteristically violent landing.
[0] I'm not sure what the technical details are or if I am getting that right...
Well, flying VFR into IMC anyway.