>> I think no monday morning quarterbacking could change this tragedy much.

I think it was Peter Garrison, in Flying magazine, who best described why pilots like to do post-mortems on crashes. I don't recall the exact words, but he admitted that it seemed somewhat shallow and/or arrogant to sit in an armchair in air-conditioned comfort and pass judgment on some poor sot who had flown into the side of a thunderstorm. Nevertheless, it's an important aspect of flying - the gist of it was that the time to figure out what you're going to do is not when the sky turns "loud, purple and sideways" as another Flying author once described it; the time to figure it out is when you're sitting in your nice comfy armchair without the prospect of imminent death to distract you.

Everything we discuss here, whether we relate it to a specific news event or not, is really following this principle; figure it out now, because when it's wet, windy, cold and totally unfamiliar, it will be too late.

I'll bet those Inuit hunters weren't wearing jeans and t-shirts when they went to sleep, but fur coats and sealskin boots; and if there was snow, I'll bet they were nice and cosy in a snow cave. That's a very different thing from lying there passively, slowly dying of hypothermia and doing nothing about it.

I wouldn't advise stripping naked and doing jumping-jacks in the snow until my arms fell off as a first line of defense; but I do believe these guys would have been better off if they had.