A Pilot’s Perspective of JFK Jr.’s Final Flight and Plane Crash

JFK Jr. 10 Years After the Crash: A Pilot's Perspective JFK Jr.'s final flight, his final hour and two minutes of life, has been dissected over and over again by multiple institutions and individual scholars. Dr. Lonnstrom's analysis, while it is the most definitive and encompassing of known and possible contributing factors, follows the logic that most other reasonable reports do; that Kennedy should never have taken off. Dr. Lonnstrom, being a statistics professor and a longtime pilot, discusses in the opening pages of his book that flying, like most things, is a numbers game. General aviation, like everything has its standard risks.

As a pilot, one's primary function to ensure the safety of any flight being undertaken, including not undertaking certain flights. It is all about numbers; aircraft performance compared to weather readouts compared to legal and personal minimums. These and many other numbers swirl around in the heads of small plane pilots before any flight that includes even a shade of doubt about weather conditions or one's own aptitude. The primary failure of John Kennedy as a pilot was that he either did not have doubts about the flight when he certainly should have, or that he chose to push himself beyond his comfort zone without giving himself a safety net of oversight. Dr. Lonnstrom uses up about half of his book just discussing the events of the hours, days, and weeks previous to the fateful trip in Piper Saratoga N253N, not merely highlighting but thoroughly illuminating every happening in Kennedy's life that should, and would have, led a clear minded pilot to cancel or postpone that flight. The Siena College professor has found thirty-two events, attitudes, and hazards that caused or may have contributed to the deaths of John Kennedy Jr., Caroline Bessette, and Lauren Bessette.

Of these, 23 factors were in play before Kennedy left the ground. The situation only worsened on the air, with 9 more life threatening factors adding up in flight. God only knows, which of these mistakes, oversights, and flaws was the straw that broke the camel's back; which factor doomed the famous trio. Among the many things that should have prevented JFK Jr. from getting in the left seat were an ankle injury, various stresses, lack of solo experience, lack of aircraft familiarity, and most of all flying over the ocean at night with no instrument rating. In no way demonizing or degrading John Kennedy as a man or even as pilot, Lonnstrom's narrative of the evening includes John-John checking the weather at his airports of departure and both of his planned landings multiple times, with positive readouts.

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Where Jr. did fall short was in his failure, for whatever reason, to humble himself and land once he realized conditions were not as good as was forecast. JFK Jr. was not a bad pilot. He was an inexperienced pilot, and a man who because of his unorthodox upbringing and adulthood, was either overconfident in his limited ability in the Piper, or ignorant of his own mortality, or both on the 16th of July 1999. So many things went wrong that day that only a man as busy and accustomed to a restless lifestyle could have thought himself able to set it all aside and fly the route. JFK died because he forgot about the first week of private pilot training; that is when a pilot is first taught about hazardous pilot attitudes. John F. Kenney Jr. was, in his mind, invulnerable. He was macho. He was antiauthoritarian. John suffered from get-there-it is. As an inexperienced pilot myself, I feel for Kennedy, there have been many days where I would have loved to go flying but an instructor with better judgment called it off. There have been days where I have been willing to fly, but not solo.

JFK Jr.'s crash was a tragedy that absolutely should have been avoided, so much emphasis is placed on decision making at all stages of pilot training that, as someone currently in training, it is almost hard to believe that the man didn't cancel the fight. It is my estimation that had JFK Jr. received accurate weather reports on the ground on New Jersey, he would not have started 300 horsepower engine in that Piper. Had he had the good fortune of running into one of the two more experienced pilots who landed at his departure airport shortly before he took off, and listened to their warnings, I believe he would have heeded them. The greatest signpost that JFK Jr. simply did not know what he was doing, was that he filed no VR flight plan for a night cross country flight over water. There is absolutely no doubt that the young Kennedy trio should have stayed on the ground that night. The women most likely didn't know enough about aviation to make any sort of decision; they were innocent. However, John Kennedy should have known better. He may have known better. Either way he made the wrong call and paid with his life.

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