JFK Jr and his Father's Murder

[Greg Doudna]

On 7/21/2024 at 7:51 PM, Greg Doudna said:

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. 

I think I understand now how it happens.

In a recent decade there were about 100 pilot fatalities due to spatial disorientation, running about 10 per year or so average in the US. Interestingly, level of experience of the pilot does not have a strong correlation to those fatalities. Spatial disorientation episodes as reported by pilots who recognized them and survived (e.g. it occurred in a cloud and they fell through the cloud but did not crash) typically can last 30-45 minutes of discomfort. On the one hand it is not a common occurrence but on the other it is expected that long-term pilots will at some point experience a recognized episode, typically perhaps once or twice per career.

But here is what I was missing before: 85% of episodes of spatial disorientation are unrecognized at the time they occur--the pilot does not know it is happening, with the only way to discover it being if they see a discrepancy in their instruments from what they think is level flight. In the VFR practice in my flight training I experienced, the test cases and training were all known and expected. But in real flight, 85% of occurrences are not known by the pilot. The pilot did not feel it or recognize it when it was happening.

But since I as a VFR pilot always scanned the instruments--taking in the instrument panel in a split second every few seconds or so or several times per minute while flying--and that is normal practice for VFR pilots--how does a pilot not notice an instrument discrepancy if there is one? The answer to that is if there is pilot overload, overload of other tasks in flying the airplane, or a distraction, or an in-flight emergency--anything. The pilot may not check their instruments until it is too late. In 99.9%-plus of the time not checking instruments as frequently as normal has no negative consequences. But those infrequent episodes of real spatial disorientation combined with a lapse in checking the instrument panel ... that can do it.

In the case of JFK Jr. both night flying and inability to see the horizon are known heightened risk factors for spatial disorientation. And the radar of his plane's movements seems to show agreement with a classic "graveyard spiral" spin caused by spatial disorientation (combined with not having seen the instrument panel until too late due to other tasks or a distraction). 

The NTSB investigation of the JFK Jr. crash as other crashes was certainly clean. Since those accident investigators reported finding no evidence of an explosion affecting the aircraft, unless positive evidence is produced that there was foul play, I no longer have serious suspicion that it was not an accident, given the known killer phenomenon of spatial disorientation. If there were positive evidence of foul play that would be the only thing that would change me on that. In the absence of positive evidence, I don't have serious suspicion that it was not an accident. 

As for possible distraction in the cockpit that could cause JFK Jr not to notice his instruments until it was too late, that is unknown. It could be anything, such as looking up a radio frequency in a manual, or maybe rechecking his map. (From the radar, JFK Jr may have been experiencing some difficulty in finding the airport landing strip visually below, which normally would be no big deal, just keep circling above until it is found, with radio communication for assistance from the ground if necessary.) Or it could relate to the two passengers, the two women, if say they were talking to him or he was trying to explain or reassure them about something, or whatever. (Worst thing one can do as a passenger to a pilot is talk to them at a critical point in flying, but not all passengers know that.)

Edited 7 hours ago by Greg Doudna