Special VFR (Visual Flight Rules) allow a pilot to fly into airspace where weather doesn't meet normal VFR requirements.
Here's the important part:
the pilot must request special VFR clearance; it cannot be solicited by the FAA, i.e., the controller can't ask the pilot, "Would you like to continue special VFR?" The FAA's liability in this matter may be determined by how the pilot ended up in such bad weather.
My personal experience with this was when I flew an instrument approach into Myrtle Beach Airport in South Carolina while I was in law school. While it was good when we left Columbia, the weather had suddenly dropped below VFR minimums -- in fact, it was close to minimums for the approach I was flying -- and I was in the clouds the last five minutes of the flight. The tops of the cloud deck was reasonably high -- 1,500 or 2,000 feet -- but for the last part of flight the only thing visible was the ground directly below us, and then intermediately.
As we got near the airport I heard another airplane (a twin-engine King Air, it turned out) switch over to our frequency. A minute or so late I was handed off to approach control and made an uneventful instrument approach, breaking out from the bottom of the clouds at about 600 feet, well above instrument approach minimums. We touched down, parked the airplane and enjoyed the next two days at the beach.
I finished law school, then worked for a judge for awhile, and next joined a law firm in Charleston, SC. One of the first cases I worked on involved that very same King Air. It turns out the pilot was not instrument rated (this is not uncommon for doctors, who can afford a much bigger airplane than their training, skill and flight currency levels safely allow). According to the ATC transcript the controller said, "Would you like to continue on special VFR?" The pilot said yes and then entered the clouds, lost control, and flew into the ground just minutes after I had landed.
By suggesting special VFR the FAA controller violated the Federal Aviation Regulations.
Does that mean you should never request a special VFR clearance? No. If you are intimately familiar with the area around the airport, and know and can identify the landmarks (highways, schools, malls, etc.) leading you there, special VFR can be a useful option.
The problem is that if the weather crumps totally and you lose sight of the land you can become disoriented, either in aircraft attitude or position over the ground, or both. This can happen to the most experienced pilot, which I assume the case was here. Flying below the radar just above the hills could have turned out to be the worst place to be.
Why didn't the pilot just climb to a safe altitude, even if it meant flying through the clouds and into controlled airspace? Here's where logic doesn't apply, but psychology does. The FAA has determined that many accidents are caused by "get-home-itis." The pilot becomes so focused on getting to his destination that he is able to talk himself into a situation where he wouldn't fly if he had had a chance to sit down and dispassionately evaluate it, like I'm doing here. Real time decision making is different than post-incident hangar flying.
Clouds usually don't drop suddenly; the bottoms get a little lower, then lower, then lower. The appearance of fog can happen quickly, however, since it results when the difference between the air temperature and dew point (the temperature that determines how much moisture the air is able to hold) approaches two degrees.
Also, in many places land doesn't suddenly increase in elevation; sometimes there's a slow -- perhaps imperceptible -- rise beneath the flight path.
My guess is that the highly trained and competent helicopter pilot flew a perfectly good airplane into the ground because he got lured by a special VFR clearance, bad terrain, and deteriorating weather conditions -- and maybe a little overconfidence.
That's just my best guess based on what's been reported thus far -- your mileage may vary.
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