Some good news

At the risk of sounding defensive and getting Andrew all fired up again (the reason so many avoid RAS to start with), I think it is pretty obvious that I made several mistakes throughout the course of this flight that caused the end result. I would say, given the conditions and clearing trend at takeoff and climb, that to say the entire flight was just an indicator of a dumb mistake of a careless pilot is a bit of an over-generalization and Monday morning quarterbacking at its worst.

While I have zero time under the hood, i have no doubt that an ARHS would have significantly changed my plan for the flight, but given the conditions under the clouds (the LS-4 that was forced to land in the valley just after me due to incredibly low ceilings) i don't know that it would have resulted in any better of an outcome, and probably would have given me a false sense of security and forced a more dangerous decision when the best option was to indeed bail out. How many pilots would intentionally go into IFR when there is a VFR hole still available? The greatest mistake in this flight was the hurry up mentality and decision to try and dive through the VFR hole.

I have no doubt in my mind that the outcome of my flight was pilot error at 18,000 feet, and little confidence that I would have used an artificial horizon to my benefit and not to my demise if i had had one on board.