(Vanity) Hypothetical: Would JFK Jr. have beaten Hillary in NY Senate race?

n/a | 21 January 2018 | ResisTyr

[Fantasywriter]

Well I do need to correct the timing of the flight. They were supposed to take off ~6:30 so that the whole flight would take place during daylight. They were delayed until ~8:40, which probably put them past even the lingering twilight. The entire flight, therefore, took place in darkness.

JFK Jr had almost no solo night time practice hours in on this plane. Still he did fine for the first lap. It wasn’t until they got to within what *should* have been sight of the Vineyard that everything went south. Due to exceptionally thick haze, the lights of the Vineyard couldn’t be seen at the usual distance. It was all solid blackness—no horizon at all.

JFK Jr must have assumed he’d gone off course. At just the point in the flight when the Vineyard would normally be visible, the plane began to fly very erratically. It descended quickly, climbed again, and then turned sharply away from the Vineyard. Some have speculated that JFK Jr actually flipped the plane briefly upside down.

Shortly after the bizarre maneuvers began the plane dropped off the radar screen. Investigators determined that it hit the water nose first, with enough force to shear both wings off. I’m not a pilot, but I’m guessing JFK Jr’s efforts to get back on course [which until then he’d been doing a good job of staying on] disoriented him quickly and completely. The nosedive ensued.

Cpdiii, I hope you don’t mind the ping. Since you are a pilot, I found your prior post very interesting.

[Fantasywriter]

It’s news to me that there were autopsies. All I previously knew was that the bodies were cremated, and then carried back out to sea and the ashes scattered.

[IndyTiger]

Autopises were performed by the Barnstable County Medical Examiner’s Office. This is indicated on JFK Jr.’s death certificate signed by the county examiner (you can google it). I remember reading that photos were also taken during the procedures, but the film was not developed. Then the bodies were cremated and later the ashes spread at sea.

[Fantasywriter]

My previous post was not intended to cast doubt on the fact that autopsies were performed. I only noted that until the other poster pinged me with the information, I had not heard any mention of it. As I related above, I was living in MA at the time of the crash. Perhaps it was considered insensitive to comment on the autopsies there. Just a thought.

[VietVet876]

Yes. Picture Junior with his wife and sister in law in his Piper Saratoga, a low wing single engine aircraft with two front and two back seats accessed by the door next to the right seat on the starboard side of the fuselage. The time of departure was coming upon civil twilight but I believe that Junior was not yet instrument rated. The two women were in the back seats, Junior in the pilot chair and the right seat vacant. Reports of witnesses after the crash indicated that a second male was in the right seat when the plain took off. Makes sense since Junior would have wanted a rated pilot to navigate in the coming dark and cloudy gloom and land the Piper safely. My theory is that the second male had a chute in his carryon bag and a handgun. Shot Junior and the girls, set the Auto pilot on a slow descent into the Atlantic and jumped out landing near the boat arranged to pick him out of the water and secret him away back to his base of operations. Paid for by Clintons. Especially since the rumor in the boroughs was that after the weekend wedding, he was going to announce Monday morning.

[taildragger]

"I thought he died because of bad weather and his lack of skills in flying that type of plane in bad weather."

Find the AOPA synopsis of his flight. I was a member at the time and read it and I was almost sick to my stomach. No I am not instrument rated, but you get the sense he got spatially disorientated and didn't believe his instruments and went with the seat of his pants feel. The tell was the rapid speed increase before impact. IMHO that is I don't know up from down and pulled back on the stick when his was in a deep left hand spiral if my memory is correct. He was probably almost inverted in a dive.

Any of this other conspiracy drivel is an insult to all of us who lost friends while PIC and have read their NTSB reports. These accidents are always a seris of bad decisions that end up in a less than optimal outcome, unless is is an exogenous event, aka engine failure, control system failure or structural failure, the last being very rare.

He could have asked his instructor to come that day, or decided not to go, or called a Maday or let a tower know he was need of flight assistance because he was temporary disoriented. Boston or Fall River would have given their eye teeth to help him if they knew it was him IMHO...

[Wallace T.]

Why was JFK, Jr., and his wife cremated? Until recent years, the Catholic Church forbade cremation. Even if, at the time of their passing, the prohibition had been lifted, why would the Kennedy family have agreed to a cremation, when the family always had traditional funeral rites? Perhaps JFK, Jr., was an inexperienced pilot, and his lack of skill caused the deaths of himself and his wife. He was the principal obstacle to Hillary Clinton winning the Senate seat from New York. Maybe this one was a coincidence, but there are just too many Arkancides around the Clintons from the 1980s to 2016 to just chalk this death up as an accident.

[Fantasywriter]

You summed it up very well. From the radar images, it appears that disorientation was the issue. Someone who knows more about it than I do said a very rapid shift to autopilot would have been the best hope. It could quickly have levelled off and stabilized the plane. Even that would have required extremely fast reactions, though. They say the average lifespan of a pilot after disorientation sets in is 178 seconds. Not long at all.

‘Meanwhile, the flight path of the Saratoga is getting ever more erratic.

21:39 The aircraft entered a left turn (towards the east) and climbed to 2,600 feet. As it continued in the turn the aircraft began a descent. Soon, the aircraft was descending at 900 feet per minute.

The aircraft stopped turning, flying east now, but continued to descend at 900 feet per minute.

20:40:15 Still descending, the aircraft entered a right turn. As the turn rate increased, the descent rate and the airspeed also increased.

At the end, the aircraft was descending faster than 4,700 feet per minute.

A reason for this may be that the aircraft was upside-down in a downwards spiral and that the pilot tried to pull back, thus accelerating the descent. He would have done this simply because he no longer had [any] idea which way was up.

21:40:34 The last radar contact with the aircraft showed it at 1,100 feet.’

https://fearoflanding.com/accidents/accident-reports/which-way-is-up-john-f-kennedy-jr-plane-crash/