If not, well he got it off the ground and kept it aloft for some time.....
nothing there that i could not teach you or anyone else how to do in under an hour. rotate at V2, apply enough rudder to counter adverse yaw, and don't do anything really sudden. it involves skill, but less skill than, say, lacing and tying shoes.
dep
No--adverse yaw is what you get when you roll into or out of a turn, from the difference in induced drag caused by the displaced ailerons. As far as I know, the left-turning tendency you encounter when you're at low airspeed, high AOA, and high power is called simply that: the "left-turning tendency." It's made up of a whole bunch of contributing factors, but basically you ignore them and shove the right rudder in until the ball centers.
I don't think the crash was purposeful at all. The witness I saw said the plane was porpoising significantly before it crashed. It looks to me like a stupid 15-year-old flight student had preflighted his airplane, as instructed, and was waiting for his instructor to come out and check up on him, when he got bored and decided to take the plane up himself.
Perhaps he thought he was ready for his first solo and his instructor had been stubbornly refusing to endorse him for it, so he figured he'd show him a thing or two.
Why did he fly toward the city? Two reasons: first, he probably knew the area and could follow familiar roads on the ground; second, it was nice and big and he could see it. Why did he crash? Because suddenly he noticed the Coast Guard helicopter behind him and tried to keep an eye on it. He ended up trying to do too many things at once, got behind the airplane, and wound up caught in a series of phugoid oscillations (the same thing that happens to a paper airplane with too much nose-up trim when you let it go from a large height).
Phugoid oscillations are not difficult to recover from when you've got your wits about you, but he didn't (he'd probably never experienced them before, because his instructor had made sure he had never before put in a control displacement large and sudden enough to get them started), and before he could get the plane under control a building got in his way. If he was trying to climb over the building without enough engine power, the phugoids would just have gotten bigger and more uncontrollable.
I don't think there's anything international or religious here: just another idiot teenager who thinks he's invincible and omniscient finding out (briefly) that he's not.
Wouldn't be surprised that he's a spoiled little rich kid whose parents paid for his flying lessons to get him off their backs.