this is why I’m inclined to say it could be either one, or even one primary to the other…..but both present; as barring evidence of a loss of aircraft control due to a conscious action taken by the pilot…..such as an overshooting final turn that isn’t accepted or taken around, and is instead turned into an attempt to salvage where the pilot pro-actively undertakes a planned maneuver and places the plane into an out of control situation; barring that kind of a situation, which would be loss of control, then it would more than likely be CFIT.
your example here reads to me more as a CFIT example. In that, to me, you are flying a planned flight path, and whether through loss of SA or channelized attention, or getting behind the jet, you don’t notice until too late that you’re being squeezed between the undercast and obstacles/ground and go IMC. At that moment, the action you take when you see trees, which places the aircraft into an out of control, or a departure from controlled flight situation just before impact, was a reactive action that was merely the last second end-state of what had been up to that point, fully controlled flight in terms of aircraft control. To me, the overall of your situation would be CFIT, but there would be a secondary contributing factor of a loss of control that prevented avoiding the CFIT. Hence how the two can be intertwined. And a circle to land or a low traffic pattern, is one of the most common where these two factors can inter-relate. In fact, this is exactly how it played out on an accident investigation I was part of for an emergency landing that crashed short of the runway, with the pilot having to bail out last second.
