It appears he clipped the very top of the ridge and was 20’-30’ away from salvaging it.
Tail and main portion of the wreckage are on different sides of the crest.

F/W dude here, who's admittedly out of his element in analyzing this accident. Though I'd really be interested in hearing from someone who regularly operates helos in the LA basin to understand if IFR ops there are even a practical option. I could believe that ATC congestion might wipe out the whole time/convenience argument of flying a helo in the first place. But at the same time, if there was ever a day when going to the trouble of filing and then just flying in the clouds (vs. trying to avoid them) would have been the safer route, it was a day like last Sunday. :eek:

We do it all the time but typically it’s easier to just follow the freeways VFR like the mishap aircraft did. ATC is great and treats us like any other IFR-filed folks when we do file. So yes, very practical, just not usually necessary (maybe it’s this attitude that leads to events such as this). Special VFR isn’t a problem, but once you get into the hills it’s easy to get stuck should conditions catch you. I’d imagine it’s largely dictated by company SOPs and protocols, not to mention any perceived sense of urgency to get the guy where he needed to be. Again, this is from a military point of view with zero corporate helicopter experience.

That unfortunately echos a vast number of CFIT accidents. So many of them just so "barely" didn't make it to clear the top of the mountain/ridge.

So true... I’d welcome a corporate helo perspective here.

Highly, highly unlikely. True, he hit just below a crest of a small ridge, but that ridge was surrounded by other much higher ridges. Factor in that he was descending at 2000fpm (disoriented and out of control), the fact that he hit 20-30’ below a ridge was pure, well, I don’t want to say coincident but he had to hit somewhere. As a former Navy helo pilot and prior S-76 pilot in the Gulf of Mexico where we flew IFR routinely during the winter, I don’t understand how he lost control so easily. He did the wrong thing by scud running in those hills, but then he did the right thing by getting on the gauges and trying to climb above the terrain. If he was rated/current/proficient on instruments, he should have been able to pull that off.

As Tandem46 mentioned, and described in the NTSB brief there were other, some higher, peaks in that area too.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=...&v=Vwk6NaQSuPA

Not familiar with the locals terrain.
Did hear a blurb on the news that the operator only had a VFR 135 certificate.
In which case the pressure to continue may even have been higher.

There was a kids basketball game to get to that started in 1 hour. Sadly, that was the pressure.

Don't know what a guy with that kind of money was doing using a single-pilot VFR operator in a cloud-prone area. The pilot's certs and ratings seem pretty basic, not sure if you'd expect a professional helo pilot to have perhaps some heavier type ratings?