JFK Jr and his Father's Murder

[James DiEugenio]

Well, we know from Gillon that he once said Bobby knew everything.

But Gillon did not follow up on that.  I could smack him one for not doing so.

[Greg Doudna]

Update on "spatial disorientation" and the JFK Jr. plane crash

For Jim DiEugenio and anyone else interested, this update: I did some more checking on both the JFK Jr. crash and the National Transportation Safety Board's finding that the cause of that crash was considered most likely "the pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation", and then to some studies of spatial disorientation.

I still remain baffled at how spatial disorientation can alone cause pilot fatalities but they do. The reason I do not understand it is I know from my own flight training how very emphatically it was drilled into me and everyone in the instruction I received on this issue: always trust your instruments, not how your body feels. They emphasized this over and over and over, telling how in the early days of flight before there were instruments pilots would get killed flying "by the seat of their pants" by feel. We had films, we had veteran pilots talk about this, we read flight manuals on this, and we had physical demonstrations of the effect in which one by one, students blindfolded would be put into a spinning chair this way and that and then raise their hand when they "felt" the spinning chair motion had stopped, and everyone could see the blindfolded student getting it wrong due to inner ear vertigo.

And I was a VFR-only pilot, but I always monitored the instruments, the altimeter, airspeed, turn and bank indicator, attitude indicator, all the time, every flight. Therefore I have read almost with disbelief accident reports of spatial disorientation causing fatal crashes, because I ask: how can that happen to pilots who know to "trust their instruments" and NOT anything else that seems in contradiction? Have trained and practiced to do that? Well, something like 20% of the crashes determined "spatial disorientation" do involve failure of instruments, and that I can understand. But I do not understand how this can happen in a case of a non-impaired pilot of sound mind who went through training similar to that which I did (which I assume was fairly standardized across the nation), in an aircraft with functioning instruments.

And yet according to the data, evidently it does happen, no matter that I do not understand it. 

The only way I can make sense of it is by an analogy. I have read that in Australia where there are very long distances in roads, the number one rule, repeated and repeated and repeated AND REPEATED, every summer, public service warnings ad nauseum: if your car breaks down, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CAR. The rule is: wait with your car by the side of the road until another car comes by and can assist (could be hours in some places, but that is the rule). And yet every summer cases happen of people having car breakdowns, and leave their car on foot, wander off the road out of sight of their car, disoriented, cannot find their way back, collapse and die. Why? Did they not get the message not to do that?

All I can think is that something wired into human psychology has humans occasionally self-violating rules trained and learned, and maybe that is what happens in some of these cases, I don't know.

As it applies to JFK Jr., the investigators could not find anything wrong with the plane, or the weather, and toxicology testing on the body showed no alcohol or drugs in his system including not even a legally-prescribed opiate painkiller for an ankle injury (I assume that was not found in his system because JFK Jr. purposely did not take it knowing he would be flying, as safe practice, based on the eight-hour "bottle to throttle" rule, zero alcohol or drugs in the 8 hours preceding a pilot's flight, federal law).

As for JFK Jr., I still find that a suspicious death. He was well-trained, had flown that stretch a number of times before, had night flight experience, was already halfway through IFR training toward an IFR (legal instruments-only) rating. He had two passengers with him and it is drilled in flight training that safe practices for pilots are nothing to be messed with. That "there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots". 

The argument is that there was no evidence of anything else amiss, and there is this known incidence of some airplane fatalities determined caused by spatial disorientation, so the logic is that must be what happened here, and because it is a known phenomenon, well, maybe that is what did happen here. 

To Jim D.: if you pursue this, my number one question to ask experienced current pilot sources today (if you don't know any personally, cold call an airport flight instructor) would be to ask how spatial disorientation crashes can happen with a trained, competent pilot and functioning instruments. Not disputing that such does happen, but try to find out how and why a trained VFR pilot would not "fly in agreement with their instruments". 

I think the JFK Jr. was a suspicious crash. But I also don't claim to know for sure what happened there.

[Bill Fite]

@Greg Doudna

Thanks for all the interesting details.

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks again Greg.

[Pete Mellor]

6 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

I think the JFK Jr. was a suspicious crash. But I also don't claim to know for sure what happened there.

Well, the official verdict of pilot error doesn't compute with me.  Communicating with Martha's Vineyard on approach for permission to land one minute, (proves he wasn't suffering from spatial disorientation) then the next, spiralling out of control into the sea.  If so why should luggage and plane debris be scattered miles from where the main body of the Piper was located?  As D.J. writes in his 'I Protest' there were three witnesses who saw an explosion in the sky over the ocean.  Sadly, we will never know for sure what happened.  The MSM just parrots the simplistic official verdict once again.