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What's in a name?
Upon the death of the scion of America's greatest political dynasty, a quick survey of American politics reminds us how much it helps to have a famous name.
By Bruce Shapiro
[07/21/99]

The Texas way of death
George W. Bush is subpoenaed over the alleged special treatment of a funeral-home mogul who's a big campaign contributor.
By Robert Bryce
[07/21/99]

Social absurdity
The push to entrust the rapacious financial industry with our Social Security money is being led by a former advisor to murderous Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
By Ian Williams
[07/20/99]

Graveyard spiral
Did bad judgment or bad luck doom JFK Jr.?
By Joan Walsh, Daryl Lindsey and Anthony York
[07/20/99]

A pilot's story
A veteran flyer recalls her near-death experience in a private plane on the New England coast.
By Phaedra Hise
[07/20/99]

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Tom Wolfe wrote in "The Right Stuff" about the denial of pilots, the eagerness to find fault with a dead pilot as a means of protecting yourself against disaster. "What a stupid idiot," we say when one of us dies. "I'd never take off and fly into thunderstorms, of course he died." He was stupid, you're not, therefore you will survive. In an accident like this that's a dangerous game to play. Which of us pilots hasn't taken off a half-hour later than planned; struggled to get comfortable in a more complex airplane the first time we soloed in it; discovered that the weather along our route was worse than forecast?

Admittedly, I'm more experienced than Kennedy was. Part of that experience comes from studying accidents and learning from them. I've been thinking about that, thinking about how this flight must have gone, how pieces of it went like so many flights I've taken. And how I can learn from it, learn to do things differently if I'm faced with similar circumstances.

No single decision or factor caused this crash. It was what safety investigators call a "cascade" of events -- a series of decisions and problems that the pilot couldn't necessarily have foreseen. No single element was truly decisive, they piled up on each other, leading up to an inevitable disaster. It started with the late takeoff.

It's hell to sit and wait for passengers to show up, especially when a weather window is quickly closing. People say, "Oh, the luxury of a private plane! You can come and go as you please!" But of course, you can't. A pilot is always at the mercy of detailed weather reports that mostly guess at what's up there in the clouds.

I have waited in airports, anxiously scanning the skies, trying to divine the moods of the clouds, wondering how much daylight is left. I have made last-minute calls to flight service for the latest weather updates. I ask for pireps, or pilot reports, filed by fliers actually up there, reporting on real visibilities, winds and cloud heights, looking at my watch and wondering where the hell the passengers are.

Taking off into dusk isn't a death sentence. Night flying over land is beautiful, with the cities of light fanning out into the highways that connect them. The radio chatter dies down and often I'm the only pilot talking to a traffic controller, who might share a friendly joke and ask me about the view. The navigational instruments help pinpoint my location as I follow along on a map, the instrument needles pointing to a beacon on the map, telling me how far away it is.

Haze isn't a lethal condition either, by itself. Flying in haze is like driving with a piece of gauze thrown over your head. You can see light, you can see enough to make out intersections, traffic signals. But everything is a little blurry, behind a white film. One scary thing about haze is that there's no telling how bad it is. Aviation weather forecasts simply say. "Visibility: 5 miles and haze." Haze, in effect, decreases visibility because it makes the far away stuff too blurry to make out. So what am I really going to have? Even if some other pilot has kindly filed a pirep, guessing visibility distance is subjective and his 3 miles may look like 2 to me.

Next page | Playing out the scene, over and over