Word: crashing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even as tears were being shed and tributes read following the crash of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane, a troubling question became hard to ignore: Should he have taken off that night? In a family famous for its appetite for risk, Kennedy was far from the most reckless. Yet he didn't shrink from pushing the edge of his personal envelope. Last Friday he may have pushed too far, as a deadly combination of too much airplane and too green a pilot apparently proved disastrous...
When the first details of the crash of Kennedy's Piper Saratoga emerged on Saturday, some experienced pilots refused to criticize his flying, since no one yet knows whether something as simple as mechanical failure caused the accident. Others, however, nodded sadly to themselves at what seemed to be Kennedy's disregard for a few basic rules of aviation safety. A licensed pilot for only a year, he nonetheless took off without filing a flight plan--something the Federal Aviation Administration does not require but that many pilots do take a moment to do. He took off from Essex County...
After the crash, much was also made of the fact that Kennedy was flying with a bad ankle, having broken it while parasailing over the Memorial Day weekend. Those concerns may have been overstated. The Saratoga does have foot-pedal controls, which require at least some degree of ankle agility to operate. But they come into play only during takeoffs and landings, which are the riskiest parts of any flight. By all accounts, however, Kennedy had no trouble leaving the runway; sadly, he never got a chance to land...
...Kennedy family--and for a nation shocked at yet another tragedy striking so star-crossed a clan--determining the causes of the crash is, for now, utterly beside the point. Other amateur pilots may learn from Kennedy's possible mistakes, but that will have to wait. For now, the price of that knowledge seems heartbreakingly high...
John F. Kennedy, Jr., who died in a plane crash earlier this week, has served on the Institute of Politics' Senior Advisory Committee (SAC) for 15 years. He was also expected to be chair of the committee next fall, according to the committee's current chair, former Senator John C. Culver...