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

"I am Buzz Lightyear!"
Thirty years after he walked on the moon, Buzz Aldrin wants to send the rest of us.
By Jeff Greenwald
[07/20/99]

The unbearable whiteness of being
This year's hate killers are weak, lonely Caucasian men who murder those who have what they don't: A sense of belonging.
By Kathy Dobie
[07/19/99]

Why Gore would censor "South Park"
In the name of protecting kids, watch for the politically correct vice president and his friends to try to shut down the trash-talking, moon-faced midgets.
By David Horowitz
[07/19/99]

Famous for being famous
From his salute to his father through his career at George, JFK Jr.'s triumphs were mostly style over substance.
By Bill Wyman
[07/18/99]

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Once I crossed the shoreline, I lost it. The blurry ocean and fuzzy sky blended together into a bright mass without the usual sharp horizon line bisecting my windscreen. I tensed my hand on the yoke, trying to keep the airplane from turning, but inevitably turning it as I tensed. With no outside visual cues, I couldn't interpret the flailing needles on the cluster of instruments. Obviously the airplane was doing something, and doing it pretty quickly. But what? I couldn't tell.

Ever since I heard about the crash this weekend, I've been thinking about that flight -- thinking about the pilot's inky last few moments, frantically scanning instruments and ransacking his brain for a pertinent flight training tidbit. Every pilot I know has been there, in an open sky full of panic. But we're still alive. It's that slim margin between life and death that fascinates me, that unknown combination of timing and training that kept me alive and killed John F. Kennedy Jr.

I knew they were all dead the moment I read the report in the Boston Globe. Any pilot knows that a 4,000-feet-per-minute descent over the ocean and subsequent disappearance from radar has no happy ending. A normal descent is 500 feet per minute. A thousand to 1,500 is considered "rapid." It didn't surprise me to read that only fragments of wreckage were washing up on shore.

It was very telling to see what those fragments were. They did not come from the outside of the airplane -- a wingtip, perhaps, or a tail beacon. When that airplane hit the water, it shredded, spilling out headrests, foam insulation, carpet fluff. These bits were torn from their mountings and casings -- government-regulated, safety-wired, flush-riveted, lock-nutted mountings and casings. The plane bored in hard and probably at an angle steep enough to cartwheel it, more devastating than a flat landing.

Ten of my 14 years of flying were spent in Boston. I spent hundreds of flight hours in and out of those same coastal airports, over that same ocean, in that same weather and in a similar aircraft. Pilots up flying Friday afternoon agree that the haze was awful. The ones I've talked with used their instrument ratings, controlling the plane solely by reference to the dials and gauges on the panel. The instruments tell you if the plane is turning, climbing, falling, speeding up or slowing down. Sometimes they appear to argue with each other. One says the plane is descending, another says it's making a steep left turn, another says the airspeed is way too fast, a light starts blinking, a radio squawks. What do you fix first? Panic and error are almost inevitable unless you've been trained, hour after tense hour, to grit your teeth and patiently piece together the bits of information, reacting to them in precise order.

A private pilot trains "on instruments" for only three hours before getting a license. I trained for more than the required 40 to get my instrument rating, sweating under the hood that prevents students from seeing outside the cockpit. The first thing I learned is not to look outside, much as I wanted to, because my eyes would betray me. I learned to ignore what my confused inner ear screams ("I'm turning! I can feel it, I know I'm turning!") and trust the instruments ("You're not turning, you're just disoriented. Look at the instruments, they all say you're level"). Trying to correct phantom turns, letting real ones go, pointing the nose toward a false horizon, all are mistakes that kill non-instrument-rated pilots who wander into the clouds.

Next page | A pilot's disease: Get-there-itis