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Sunday's weather was the type most people would rather not see from the window of an airplane.

Fog and low-lying clouds, which made the mountains higher than the sky, cloaked much of Patrick County about the time a private airplane crashed into the side of Bull Mountain while attempting to land at nearby Blue Ridge Regional Airport. All 10 people on board were killed.

But it would be premature to assume that weather caused the accident, according to pilots and aviation experts.

The Federal Aviation Administration's lowest permitted ceiling, or the distance from the ground to the clouds at the Blue Ridge airport, is between 400 and 500 feet, depending on which approach a pilot takes, said Matt Broughton, a Roanoke pilot who has made the landing dozens of times.

According to the National Weather Service, the ceiling at the airport was 600 feet at about the time of the crash.

Visibility at the airport was five miles; the minimum visibility required for a safe landing at Blue Ridge is between 1 and 1 3/4 miles, depending on the type of aircraft.

"It was safe to fly ... there's no question in my mind," said Broughton, president of the IFR Pilots Club in Virginia, a private group that studies airplane crashes and provides safety information to pilots, who rely on instrument flight rules.

Broughton, who happened to be driving past the airport Sunday afternoon at about the time the plane went down about 10 miles away in neighboring Patrick County, said the clouds were low enough to obscure the tops of some mountains.

But that would not have been a concern for him had he been piloting a Beech King Air 200, the type of aircraft that was carrying members of Hendrick Motorsports on the way to Sunday's NASCAR race in Martinsville when it crashed. The airplane has good equipment, he said, and the approach into Blue Ridge Airport is not a difficult one.

Between 30 and 40 other private airplanes, drawn to the Martinsville area for Sunday's race, were able to make the landing.

"One came in right in front" of the doomed aircraft, airport manager Tommy Grimes said. There is no control tower at the single runway airport. Pilots communicate with air traffic controllers at the Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, N.C., during landings and takeoffs.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane after it broke off its initial approach to the airport and began a flyover.

Because of Sunday's weather, pilots were relying on their instruments to approach the runway. "With today's technology, you can tell where you are within a 12-foot circle," Grimes said.

However, the plane had no flight data record, cockpit voice recorder or ground-proximity monitoring system that would have warned its pilots of an approaching land mass such as a mountain, said Brian Rayner, a National Transportation Safety Board investigator.

Even without the ground-proximity warning system, other instruments on the plane should have guided its pilots to the point where they broke through the cloud ceiling and were able to see the airport, Broughton said.

"When you have a ceiling that is above minimum, and when you're dealing with professional pilots, I'm not surprised at all that a lot of planes made it in and this one did not," he said.

"What that tells me is that unless the pilots messed up, something went catastrophically wrong with that aircraft."

At the time of the crash, the wind was calm and there was no rain in the area.

Other pilots agreed that given the conditions provided by the weather service, landing at the airport - which serves Martinsville and the surrounding area - should not have presented a major problem.

"There's nothing particularly challenging about Martinsville compared to any other airport with similar facilities," said Gordon Ewald, an independent flight instructor based in Roanoke.

John Molumphy, a Roanoke pilot who said he has flown into the airport many times, agreed that the 5,000-foot runway surrounded by gently rolling hills should not have presented a problem for the Beech King Air, which has two pilots.

"With two pilots, it really shouldn't be a factor."

Staff writer Mike Allen

contributed to this report.