One facet of aviation accident reporting is the detection of trends. Recently, aircraft have crashed during approaches in IMC, or while enroute in weather. Since the NTSB will keep their causal cards close to their vest during their investigations, we won’t get an official evaluation on those mishaps. However, the trend is that weather is getting wintry, with cloud bases coming down to approach minimums. As the videos of these tragedies show, the planes departed controlled flight, and descended vertically to the ground. Communications with the pilots usually were routine, though a couple of crashes did include distress calls. It may be a trend I’ve noticed, and studied for quite a while: Pilots aren’t proficient, because they’re not flying their planes. Once they pickle the computer couplings, they can’t keep the bird upright in IMC (Sometimes in VMC!) The FAA f-i-n-a-l-l-y recognized said trend, and they’re trying to coax pilots to at least train for manual flights in all regimes. Let’s hope that trend will have an effect on aviation safety.