Controlled flight into terrain can cover incidents such as flying in limited visibility using instruments where the instruments aren’t wrong, the pilot is consc

Controlled flight into terrain can cover incidents such as flying in limited visibility using instruments where the instruments aren’t wrong, the pilot is conscious and in control, but gets task focussed or misinterprets a signal and takes deliberate action that ends up in an unplanned lithobraking event. Flying limited visibility or with horizon obscured is a typical scenario for controlled flight into ground. Some pilots will also feel less confident with a particular implementation of the artificial horizon. Then there are transition states between particular instrument assisted flight modes (“autopilot”) and manual flight modes, as well as assisted flight modes where the pilot and the computers disagree on the appropriate course of action (similar to, say, automatic trim of horizontal stabiliser in aircraft with engines slung under the wing). The pilot might switch modes and assume control over pitch and yaw but the computer was handing over control of throttle. So the pilot ends up fighting the computer for control rather than actually flying the aircraft. Labelling it “pilot error” can cause investigators to stop looking for the root cause. “Controlled flight into ground” leads to the question “why would an otherwise competent pilot do what this pilot did?”