How 4 Avoidable Mistakes Doomed the Final Flight of JFK Jr
‘Oh, God!’ the world said, ‘Not another Kennedy!’
It happened on Friday, July 16, 1999—more than 22 years ago. But John F. Kennedy Jr’s tragic plunge into the ocean didn’t have to happen.
Many Americans can still remember their reaction when they first heard about his plane crash into dark ocean waters.
I had a personal connection to the story. I had piloted my plane on the same route that day. I saw the dense haze from inside the cockpit. After the accident a Newsweek reporter called to get a first-hand report. The story he wrote was headlined, “Vertigo in the Void.” It included the following sympathetic quote.
EXCERPT: Many pilots have felt the sensation (of vertigo) at one time or another, and they watched last week’s sad drama off Martha’s Vineyard with a special kind of emotion. “Every pilot I know is just sick and so upset by what happened,” says John Emmerling, an advertising executive in New York who flew his private plane to his Cape Cod weekend home just hours before Kennedy departed. “It’s just like we got socked in the stomach.”
I had also told the reporter it was nuts for Kennedy to fly in that haze without an instrument rating. What the hell was he thinking? Thankfully, the reporter chose not to…
