Let’s start by dispensing with the obvious: “Loss of control in flight” is a lousy explanation, and not much better as a description. Eventually we’ll come up with something better, which hopefully will reflect the myriad ways pilots can let aircraft get away from them. Spatial disorientation in IMC is as different from a moose stall as wake turbulence is from sloppily flown S-turns on final. At best, the ICAO’s accident taxonomy—adopted by the FAA and NTSB, presumably in the name of “harmonization”—provides snapshots of how accident sequences end with negligible insight into what triggered them or how they developed. As a safety strategy, “Don’t lose control” is about as useful as “Don’t let the engine quit.”
One way to make something useful from a misleadingly generic label lumping together disparate elements is to separate them back out into more meaningful components. The hazards that lead to LOC-I can be usefully partitioned along two dimensions: those resulting from pilot inputs vs. external factors, and the altitude available to recover.
