Posted On: Saturday - April 5th 2025 1:18PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity History Hildabeast Science
(Continued directly from our last post.)
Over 6 years ago, a writer named Laurent Guyenot had an article published on The Unz Review titled The Broken Presidential Destiny of JFK, Jr.. The subtitle, Israel's "Kennedy Curse"? really made little sense, as the writer concentrated elsewhere in trying to EXCUSE this unnatural death.
We've discussed the likely cause of JFK, Jr.'s death and that of his wife and sister-in-law more than enough in the last post. We'll still have to refer to that explanation a bit here, but Let's get to the possible motives for a more nefarious explanation.
Yes, there were motives to support the idea of foul play in the death of JFK, Jr. I (sounding like Ron Unz here some more, haha) had no idea of any of them until reading this article This writer did a very nice job relating something of this John Kennedy's upbringing (very close with his mother Jackie (then) Onassis) and his rise into a man considered a big rising D-party star and very-possible not-too-far-off eventual Presidential candidate.
When it came to immediate consideration of Kennedy for US Senator from New York, Patrick Moynihan having just retired, it turns out there was one other contender. That'd be one Hillary Clinton, known locally (here) as The Hildabeast. (We REALLY don't like her, and that goes back well before Trump v Hildabeast in '16.) Of course, I followed the carpetbagging entry of the Hildabeast into national politics via the NY Senate, but what I hadn't known, long since caring about New York, is that Mr. Kennedy had been a more-likely candidate. Mr. Guyenot's article says that multiple sources had Kennedy about to announce his run, first time in official politics, a few days before his fatal plane crash.
Kennedy was an actual New Yorker with personal, business, and political ties to NYC. The Hildabeast was, again, a carpetbagger out of Arkansas. (Well, a reverse carpet-bagger, I suppose.) The ctrl-left wanted its man, someone much more to the left than old-school leftist Patrick Moynihan, in this US Senate seat. The Hildabeast had to do, in the end, though nobody really had to like her. However, the NYC crowd (too big a proportion of the State, unfortunately) loved them some JFK, Jr. I believe he would have won a primary election. Time for another Sirhan Sirhan deal? I could see that. The Clintons had been known to off some folks in their day.
This alone is a good motive, and Mr. Guyenot had more than that to say. As you'd expect, with his father having been murdered when he was a toddler, John, Jr. wanted to investigate what really happened to his father. His uncle Robert got into that and was dead himself 4 1/2 years later. Were it a more nefarious thing than the official story - and talk about motives! (as we did). whoever was responsible would not want to let John, Jr. get too far with this, one would think. So, yes, there are plenty of reasonable theories of a motive to kill this guy.
I had a real time with the rest of this article though. This is because the writer went into the possible means with details to try to match his suggested motives. This caused great exasperation with the whole attempted EXCUSE for me, including trying to correct the record in both the article and the comments. Laurence Guyonot does not know enough about the subject of flying to write an article like this. By claiming to see unexplained discrepancies in the story as some sort of good evidence of nefarious deeds, he fails at his theory.
I will refute the errors in this article, not to point out the writer's stupidity, but to show that all these pieces of supposed evidence of a doctored-up story are untrue. Some of my exasperation is with the commenters*. Since their claims are not, of course, Mr. Guyenot's fault (though he chimed in a few times but refuted none of it), I will leave them out. A couple of my points come from a video that the writer embedded, recommended, and used for support. It is garbage, at least the part I was led to watch. Here's a non-exhaustive list of my problems with this supposed conflicting and damaging evidence:
1) The last portion of the flight path of N9253N, Mr. Kennedy's Piper Saratoga: Evidence claimed for the idea that the plane was shot down or bombed was not much more (I'll get to the other part) that its path was nearly vertical as seen on the scale used by the NTSB investigators. Yes, the airplane didn't go very far horizontally as it came down. The writer's problem is not understanding how the approach/center radar works. Each sweep takes a while, 5 to 12 seconds - you can see the antennae rotating as some airports that have the radar on site. A normal "standard rate" turn of an airplane is 2 minutes, but when you're in that tight spiral, in a spin, or at the very worst, broken into pieces**, it's a lot quicker than that. From radar returns, you're not going to see any kind of coherent horizontal path, or know which way the plane could be considered heading. So, this is not evidence of a bomb or shoot-down.
2: The weather reports conflicted!: Even back in 1999, the fairly new at the time ASOS (Automatic Surface Observation System) weather broadcast from Martha'a Vineyard airport had the local weather which was clear and hazy with light winds. The tower was still open at the time Kennedy was coming in, and, after the fact, the controller reported that this visibility as higher than the ASOS reported more like 10-12 miles. That does not mean Kennedy did not have lower visibility where he was. Still, it was VFR. As we wrote last post, there would not be much of a horizon, so basic instrument skills, something Kennedy was reported good at, were needed.
Local news reports gave all kind of reports of what the weather had been, as Mr. Guyenot considered these as evidence of discrepancies, cover-ups, and the like. Yes, as if the hype days after the crash from local news sources is what you can trust. He even noted erroneously a difference between "clear" and "5 miles visibility". See, discrepancy! NO. "Clear" means no cloud cover (sometimes just below 12,000 ft). It WAS clear. It can be "3 miles in clear skies" Lower than that visibility, there must be "haze", "fog", "smoke", "snow" etc, associated. In flying, "visibility" is a different parameter of a weather report or forecast than cloud cover.
Since I'm getting into this, the writer saw Kennedy's long delay on the ground at Caldwell airport, waiting for his 2 passengers. as some kind of sign of something. I can imagine this still fairly inexperienced pilot's trepidation, as he was used to having an instructor with him. That's not a good thing, but, being cautious enough, Kennedy was worried about both that it was nighttime, and that with the temperature and dew point trending very close together at the other end, the weather could come down way down. Fog could form quickly. He had a reason to want to get going, and passenger delays, even though one of the advantages of having one's own plane, can mess with one's plans when weather is involved.
3: Kennedy's altitude and call to the Vineyard Tower: It's maddening when the guy calling out "unexplained" happenings to bolster his theory doesn't bother going to obtain an explanation. The writer wrote a bit about Kennedy's having descended a few hundred feet then back up to 2,500 because of the tower airspace. This made no sense. First of all, the tower airspace goes up to 2,500 ft above the ground ("agl" is about the same as "msl" (altitude above mean sea level) on these islands and over the, well, sea) only within 4.2*** nautical miles from the center of the airport, not 15 miles out where Kennedy was then. (He'd started a smooth descent from his cruise altitude of 5,500 ft from about 35 miles out. That's about right, maybe a little early. 500 ft./min. is comfortable, and he'd be doing about 2 1/2 miles/minute in the descent. 4,500 ft to lose until the pattern = 9 minutes = about 22 miles.)
There's nothing wrong with calling the tower at 15 miles out, but Kennedy was nowhere near in his airspace yet.
4: A boater saw/heard the whole thing!: When I first read "A trial lawyer in a ...", OK, that's about it. I kept going and noted that the supposed sight of an explosion that the author mentioned from some other eyewitness wasn't corroborated, but the boater heard a bang. In the middle of the calm water at night, you're going to hear a bang, for either the break-up of the airplane, but more likely from it hitting the water hard. But, let me get back to flying stuff...
5: Kennedy may have had an instructor onboard, and he took seats out.: I just looked back at this, and this is one I've got to excerpt as an example of abject stupidity:
One question has been the focus of much attention from independent researchers: was there a flight instructor as co-pilot in the plane? Officially, there wasn’t. No fourth body was recovered in the wreckage. But strangely enough, one seat was also missing, and conspiracy theorists such as John Hankey have speculated that it might have had a flight instructor’s body seat-belted on it, which might have been spirited away for the sake of building up the story of an incompetent and reckless John. For if John had flown with a flight instructor, then the whole argument of his recklessness falls.And he wouldn't have augured in either, so no need to hide any bodies. Why would this instructor have not saved Kennedy? Was he a suicidal maniac sent to kill them all? Why not find another way ... I'll get to this. The evidence of his body was "spirited away", sure, and I guess nobody missed the guy either. Just another flight instructor, ... well, it was kind of like that in those years. ;-} His death would have helped out another pilot trying to get a job, so there's that.
One neat thing about the Piper Saratoga/Lance/Cherokee 6, as with its twin-engined sister the Seneca, is that is can be, and is often configured for "club seating". The two rows of seats behind the front two face each other. Conversation can be made more readily, cards can be played, liquor can be drunk, and so on. Seats can be taken out easily, and if there was anything going on with seats, it was likely to take out the middle 2, leaving the one back passenger with lots of room facing forward. Did Kennedy's making conversation with her - I assume the SIL - become the start of his spatial disorientation? That could easy be the case. I think THIS, if anything, was the "missing seat" story.
UPDATE from NTSB report: The plane was arranged with club seating and all 6 seats were in the plane. I hate riding backwards, and if the 2nd passenger felt the same, she'd have been facing forward 5 ft or so behind the front 2 seats.
6) The logbooks were missing, meaning... something. Yes, that meant something. That meant the JFK, Jr. was not stupid. Bringing along airplane or personal logbooks (especially the former) is generally stupid, unless one wants specifically to get them to point B. There are 2 reasons for each type, overlapping for the 2nd (C):
A) Airplane logbooks - it is said, with numbers pulled out the rear, that losing one's A/C logbooks will reduce the resale value of a plane 10%, 25%, who knows? The records of how the airplane was kept up and often improved are important for any buyer. Otherwise, he will have to assume the worst, at the very least requiring expensive inspections that might have already been done, etc. You don't want to lose them, so you keep them in a safe place at home.
B) Pilot logbooks - These have great sentimental, maybe even historical value. ("Remember when we landed here and met, ohhhh, John John!" "Let me look up when that was.") You would hate to lose them for this reason.
C) Airplane AND pilot logbooks - After any kind of accident or a known violation of rules (usually about airspace), the FAA will want to look at both pilot and aircraft logbooks (both especially after an accident). If they are in the airplane, then the FAA can get them easily and quickly. This is a case in which you might WANT to "lose" them. I'll say no more...
That was too comprehensive****, I know, but it completely refutes Laurent Guyenot's idea that the lack of logbooks found in the wreck of Kennedy's plane means something strange.
UPDATE from reading the NTSB report: The mechanics back in New Jersey allegedly said Kennedy did keep the logbooks on him. Hmmmm, I hate to impugn the guys, but that's what a lot of mechanics might say to avoid trouble, knowing the logbooks would be smudged gibberish under the sea. That would sure keep things simple.
7) Aviation vs. Navigation: This is another attempt at an explanation by Mr. Guyenot that is not helpful to his cause, if one understands flying. He doesn't get what flying "by instruments" is even about, as he supports his theory that Kennedy's competence would not have let this loss of control happen:
So, even if the visibility had been very bad — which it was not — John could have guided his plane safety to the airport, using his autopilot if necessary.We're not talking navigation here. Even by the mid-1990s' small aircraft owners could afford basic non-moving-map GPSs - one hell of a change too! In 1999, JFK, Jr. would not have felt a dent his budget from such a purchase. Yes, he could GET to Martha's Vineyard. You just can't follow the GPS to get there when you're in a graveyard spiral is all - Kennedy's problem was controlling the airplane, not navigating.
The writer did bring up the autopilot here again. At least from more reading since yesterday, I do think that Mr. Kennedy relied way too much on the autopilot. One should not NEED it in a plane like that, period.
8) The alleged CVR: I can't shake the feeling that this writer cannot picture general aviation aircraft. This is not some jet with those big "black" but actually orange boxes attached to the airframe in the "aft equipment bay". It's a little plane as the public would view it. It did have that foot-long (mostly battery) ELT (Emergency Locating Transmitter) that is required for cross-country flight - technically over 50 nm flight. That wasn't a point here.
What Kennedy did have in his plane was something pretty new at the time, an in-line with the microphone digital recorder. The idea is mostly to help someone who's not great with the radios to playback a clearance. (It can also get one out of trouble, were it the controller who made a mistake and some pilot violation was alleged.) So, the battery was missing, the writer says. Listen, Mr. Guyenot, this wasn't airline operations - it's the one reasonably diligent aircraft owner and private pilot. I don't think something like that would have survived days under the sea either.
That's it for today, on this old story. If the reader has gotten this far, I thank you for wading through all this. Since you're here, I'll also let you know that Part 3 (I swear it!), the conclusion, to be posted on Monday, will be a lot easier to read. The reader may already surmise that I don't agree that there were nefarious acts that brought the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. in his airplane. However, that's not actually my main point in writing all this. Come, Monday ...
* One commenter claimed a pilot must be on an instrument flight plan ("clearance" is what he meant) to fly at night. That is the case, from what I know, in Europe, and in Canada, one must have a separate rating above the Private Pilot certificate to do that. In the US it's always been perfectly legal to fly VFR at night.
It's one thing to ignore my correction. I've been back-and-forth with commenters who, when they finally realize I'm right, just stop replying. This guy, though, didn't reply, and then repeated his mistake (at that point a lie, because neither listened to me nor looked it up.)
** A good question is THEN what would the radar show? Primary radar - reflection off the metal, is pretty poor, though possibly the scope would show a few faint primary returns. The transponder (designed to help show aircraft on radar) would have remained with the fuselage, so ... that's about all the depth I want to go into about that ...
*** This is a weird one, Everything else is in nice round nautical mile numbers. This one is 5 STATUTE miles, hence, just over 4 nautical miles.
**** Let me add here that I refer to 1999 here, when this accident happened. Before then, one could have electronic versions, but paper was still favored. From about that time on, pilot logbooks could be put online, and nowadays save the latest flights in the cloud and what-not in real-time. It's just that, no Kennedy didn't have a Read/Write CD on him. Why would he? It was still 1999.
Airplane logbooks are still on paper, but as of late, mechanics/inspectors surely have electronic back-ups... most of them.
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[UPDATED 04/08:] Added point 8. Modified points 5 and 6.
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Comments:
SafeNow
Saturday - April 5th 2025 9:25PM MST
PS
When I click on the comments to the previous essay, these do not display.
Mr. Moderator, these last essays of yours show a formidable knowledge of private piloting. Are you / were you a private pilot? Or is it armchair knowledge resulting from having read a lot of stuff about the JFK Jr. flight? I do not dismiss the degree to which indirect knowledge can be extensive. I have seen all of the Mayday videos, and now know a lot about why commercial jets crash.
When I click on the comments to the previous essay, these do not display.
Mr. Moderator, these last essays of yours show a formidable knowledge of private piloting. Are you / were you a private pilot? Or is it armchair knowledge resulting from having read a lot of stuff about the JFK Jr. flight? I do not dismiss the degree to which indirect knowledge can be extensive. I have seen all of the Mayday videos, and now know a lot about why commercial jets crash.
Moderator
Saturday - April 5th 2025 5:26PM MST
PS: Hey guys. Thanks for the comments on this and the previous post. I have one more fun post to write tonight, but I'll get back on here tomorrow for comments.
The Alarmist
Saturday - April 5th 2025 3:14PM MST
PS
All it takes is something to block the static system, especially when already in fllight. Your altimiter freezes at whatever it was at the blockage, the VSI reads zero, and your indicated airspeed would be higher than your actual airspeed as you plummet toward the Earth.
In those conditions, even an experienced pilot might have difficulty recognizing the cognitive dissonance between what the still operating guages are telling him and what he is hearing from outside.
Accident, malfunction, or something sinister? We’ll never know.
🕉
All it takes is something to block the static system, especially when already in fllight. Your altimiter freezes at whatever it was at the blockage, the VSI reads zero, and your indicated airspeed would be higher than your actual airspeed as you plummet toward the Earth.
In those conditions, even an experienced pilot might have difficulty recognizing the cognitive dissonance between what the still operating guages are telling him and what he is hearing from outside.
Accident, malfunction, or something sinister? We’ll never know.
🕉
Adam Smith
Saturday - April 5th 2025 1:42PM MST
PS: Good afternoon, Achmed!
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/fTQAAOSwmTlgJEsy/s-l1600.webp
Lol... I haven't even finished reading part one.
☮️
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/fTQAAOSwmTlgJEsy/s-l1600.webp
Lol... I haven't even finished reading part one.
☮️
I won't get into my background, but yeah, I know all about this business/hobby of aviation. As for JFK, Jr. in particular, I got into this after an exasperating on-line conversation about the crash of Paul Wellstone of Minnesota about 2 decades back. It might have been better to have written this stuff about Kennedy on the 25th anniversary of the crash, last summer.
I just read through most of the NTSB report. I got a few things out of that that should have been in that post - a reminder of one more ignorant thing Guyenot wrote about Kennedy's airplane, elucidation re: the seats, something about the logbooks, but, man, they did a nice job, same as with their report on Paul Wellstone.