"Kennedy, the 38-year-old son and namesake of America's 35th president, was flying with his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, 33, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, 34, when his six-seat, single-engine Piper Saratoga crashed seven miles south of his Martha's Vineyard home. All three were killed.
A report by the National Transportation Safety Board blamed pilot error for the crash, saying Kennedy, who had been flying for 15 months, was not skilled enough for low-visibility nighttime flying and became disoriented in the hazy sky."
The Assassination of JFK Jr - Full Version
Poster Comment:
John John Had been flying for 17 years, he had already passed the quals for IFR, and his instructors all said that he was "methodical in his planning".
They murdered him, folks.
And I'm still sick about it.
If you don't have 1:46:48 to watch the video now, please bookmark it and watch it later. The skullduggery surrounding this plane crash is even more obvious than when they murdered his father.
John F. Kennedy, Jr. obtained his private pilot certificate in April 1998. He received a "high performance airplane" sign-off in his Cessna 182 in June 1998 and a "complex airplane" sign-off in the accident airplane (Piper Saratoga) in May 1999. Although he completed the FAA's written airplane instrument examination about four months before the accident, he did not possess an instrument rating.
Junior's estimated total flight experience, excluding simulator training, was about 310 hours, of which 55 hours were at night. The pilot's estimated flight time in the accident airplane was about 36 hours, of which 9.4 hours were at night. Approximately three hours of that flight time was without a certified flight instructor on board, and about 0.8 hour of that time was flown at night, which included a night landing. You are giving him credit for 17 years of flying time, which is totally misleading and irrelevant. As anyone can see, his RECORD is 310 hours total time as PIC.
Also passing a written IFR ticket exam is not that difficult, passing the instrument flight check is totally different. Junior got himself into a situation that was far beyond his capabilities, VFR rated only and in very marginal VFR conditions.
I would tend to agree. My father was a Flight Instructor so I know that green pilots do sometimes make stupid mistakes in judgment and they can be fatal. One student my father taught killed himself and his two sons when he tried to duplicate a barnstorming trick, without my father's experience, that my father had done in a moment of showing off. I think my father always felt responsible for it because if he hadn't flown under that bridge his student might not have thought to try it. Sad.
However, stupid beginner pilot stunts aside the circumstances around JFK Jr.'s "crash" seem to be disturbingly clear.
The one that has always stood out for me was that just before his plane went down he had radioed the tower at Martha's Vineyard letting them know he had the landing field lights in sight and was beginning his final approach. That directly contradicts the assertion that he was lost in a cloud bank resulting in his spiraling out of control. Yes, if you lose your orientation, and don't know how to use the artificial horizon, you can go into a death spiral. However, from the radio contact with the tower that would appear to NOT be the case.
What did occur was that he began his descent and then abruptly lost contact and plummeted almost straight down. That is consistent with Sherman Skolnick's assertion that it was likely a barometric bomb in the tail section which blew the plane's tail off along with the control surfaces when he began his descent and passed below the trigger level.
Also interesting was that the debris from the plane was never in public view. It was recovered from the ocean and kept under guard at a military base (shades of the WTC 1&2 debris Batman). As well the bodies were quickly cremated without autopsy. Could it be that autopsy would have shown injuries from an explosion?