Anatomy of a Crash: Full Episode

Erin and I (Jamie) return to the story of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in this special episode. This time we focus on the final hours leading up to the 1999 plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn, and her sister Lauren.

Drawing directly from the official NTSB accident report and other primary sources, Erin breaks down the chain of events—weather conditions, pilot experience, aircraft details, and widespread misconceptions—to offer a clear, factual “anatomy” of what happened that night. 

Along the way, we address persistent myths, discuss how public perception of the Kennedys has shifted, and reflect on the cultural moment in which the tragedy occurred. Our hope is a respectful and hopefully illuminating look at a story often clouded by rumor.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to Ambivalent Offenders. This is Jamie. And this is Aaron. And we are continuing our free examination or a follow-up with our original Carolyn Bissette Kennedy series. Many of you might have listened and just talked about that. That was our third episode. So we apologize for some of the crosstalk and we were using Zoom back then.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

It was in our early days. It was a rougher version of the podcast. We've at least upgraded our technology at this point. Yeah. Even though this is still, again, this is a sidekick. This isn't our main source by any means. No, we're we're not racking in the millions from podcasting. No. Go figure.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

But many people have been interested to learn more about Carolyn Bissett Kennedy, especially because she is such an enigma. So I know many of you found our podcast through that. Or we also did the start of a love story talk that was finished on Patreon. I do want to acknowledge first we have some new Patreon members. So some of our paid members who are new, Courtney, Katie, Sophie. Thank you so much for supporting the pod. Thanks, guys. It really helps. Again, we just do this for fun because we love history and we love to tell stories and it connects us as if you didn't know, we're twins, so it helps connect us. And then we also have some new free members. We have William, Jennifer, and Heidi. Thank you as well. Hey guys. So for those who are not familiar with our Patreon, go to our Patreon link. It's in our show notes. Or you can just go to Patreon and search Ambivalent Offenders. We have a free level, which we do offer some little extras, some mini episodes, sometimes polls that will even allow for free members. Or we have two member tiers. We have a$3 a month and then a$5 a month, and you get with that bonus content. For example, we know we're doing more love story bonus content on our Patreon.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

We're going to wrap up the series since the show just wrapped up. So you're going to get at least one more love story episode.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

And you will get as we go and move into our Kennedy series, which is next.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Preview preview.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

I'm going to be doing Rose Kennedy. So JFK, not JFK Jr., but JFK's mother. And Aaron's going to be doing Joseph Sr., the man, the myth, the legend. And it's kind of perfect timing because Netflix just released a still of Michael Fastbender as Joe Sr. Because they're doing their own American version of royalty. So like the crown.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

We talked about flattering casting. Michael Fastbender is Joe Sr. That's right up there for some very flattering casting.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

Those ones we're going to be doing on the main pod, but then on the Patreon pod, I will be doing Ted Kennedy and we'll see. There's so many Kennedys that have so many interesting stories. We know not everybody's interested in the Kennedys. So our series most likely will just be those two to start Rose and Joe Sr. And then if you're interested, you can always reach out to us at ambivalent.podcast at gmail.com or the best source to find us is our Instagram. If you search ambivalent offenders, podcasts that will come up or ambivalent offenders pod. Aaron does amazing previews to our episodes. That's a great way to see what's coming up, especially if you're somebody who's interested to know what's coming up. We're trying to get back into about every two weeks recording our lives. Sometimes just take those turns, as we said, not our full-time job, but our goal is to do every two weeks. And you can always get a preview of when that next episode's coming with Aaron on Instagram with a preview. Also, I noted on Instagram, but I realized that our listeners don't always know we have an Instagram page. So it was a bad thing to do, was I noted a giveaway for Once Upon a Time, which was the Carolyn Bissett Kennedy biography that love story is based on, technically based on that was that's the core text. So we're doing a giveaway of that, except I announced it on our Instagram and not on our podcast, which I was like, we don't have there's not always a crossover. So I'm changing the date. If you aren't on our Instagram and you're like, I haven't heard anything, that's because we're gonna change the date. So it's now gonna be open till April 10th. For those who are paid members on Patreon, you get three already three entries into our giveaway. Our free members on Patreon get an extra, so you get two entries. And then everybody else, if you give us a review, we can obviously see your name. So if you give a review, then you will get in with one entry. If you rate us, we can't see who rates us, but you can just email us or put under our giveaway, which we'll put on Instagram, you can say reviewed, Mungle Trust You will play the honor system. We're Midwest girls, we will play the honor system. That will give you an entry. So you can do multiple things. You could rate and review, and that would give you two entries. And you could also join the Patreon, however, you want to do it. If you do the paid version, you also do get a week trial. So if you're like, oh, they want to see what they already have out there, we have already some bonus episodes and things like that. You get access to all that past stuff. You can always try it out and go from there.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Hopefully, you'd do a trial and like what you see and want to sign up, but at very least, try to do the giveaway because the book is good. And if you've been enjoying what we've been talking about here or been enjoying Love Story, I think you'll enjoy reading that book to learn more about Carolyn's life and story. So today, Aaron, what what are we focusing on? If you've clicked into the episode, you'll know it's called An Anatomy of a Crash. So we are going to be talking about obviously the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bassett, Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bassett. We're going to get into the details. I know in the original series, I skimmed over. I didn't want to get too bogged down into the crash because there's so much that you can talk about. A lot of this information is out there. There is a report out there that you can read. Yep, it's public record. It is. Just a note that we're gonna try to keep this as factual as possible, as we're not gonna try to speculate about what was going on in the cabin during the flight. This is not the show. We're not here to speculate or talk about what they would have been feeling like. This is just facts that we know. And it was a small plane, so there's no black box, you know, for some of those bigger plane crashes. There's a black box. You usually can hear what was going on going on. Yeah, that there's not here. So we don't know. And I think any speculation is unhelpful. So yeah, that's what we're gonna do.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

We will compare though to what we do know with versus what the show shows based on other factors, but not the black box. If you finished the show, you know, obviously, as part of the finale, the crash happens in real life. That was kind of one of those moments that I do really remember, even though at that time it's not like we were huge history buffs. We were 11. We have a brother who played hockey. We were at a hockey tournament. It would have been that Saturday after when they started the search. I remember them. It was still a search at that point.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Yeah, there's the search and rescue, people not knowing what happened. There was a potential thought that maybe they had landed somewhere else or something else. So obviously, until the plane was discovered, we didn't know exactly what had happened. It is one of those moments, and I know people of our parents' generation who were alive during the John F. Kennedy assassination, it's a bookend. There's these two bookends. It was in July 99. You're a couple years out from 9-11. 9-11, which is also a big moment where people say the 90s truly died. Yeah. And then also you had Princess Diana, this is the dying days of the 90s.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Yeah, and I know a lot of people, which we're not going to talk in this episode, but there is that nostalgia for like pre-cell phone, pre-social media, New York City, and obviously pre-9-11, New York. I know talking to our mother who's born in, I won't give her exact year, but in the 1950s. She remembers being in elementary school and her teacher crying at her desk when JFK was assassinated. And yes, she remembered, clearly remembers JFK Jr. with the plane and just how tragic that was. Unfortunately, what else is there to say besides a tragedy? Right. When somebody young or anybody, it doesn't have to be a young person, but especially somebody in a family who has faced a lot of many, many, many tragedies. And I think now, as I was talking to our mother this weekend, us being 37, we're older than Carolyn ever got to be. We're almost the same age JFK Jr. was. Puts it in perspective. Yeah. Adds an extra impact. You really see how those lives were really young. Yeah, I'm justifying us being young. Or babies. Yes. So, so young. Yeah, so we will be talking about the crash. Like Aaron said, we're not going to go into the gory details. When initially the show started, obviously, for those who've watched it, it starts with them getting on the plane, getting ready to go on the plane. And this is the episode that I had been dreading. And we're not going to talk, I guess, too much about the episode. So I should asterisk this. We're going to do another episode about love's story and how they cover it. This is going to be mostly the facts. What actually happened? The actual history. But knowing that the last episode was, was it search and rescue? It's the name of it. And then just knowing that they started the series with this ominous piece. It was like, okay, what are they going to show about the crash? How much? Because again, there's that delicate line because us as humans, we want to know information. And like Aaron said, we're going to go into what we do know, but we're going to try not to get into that too much.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

We're not going to editorialize. We're not going to add because there's a lot that we do know. So we should talk about what we actually know versus what we can speculate. And there's so many places out there that people do speculate. Go on Reddit. If you want that, there's a space for that.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Right. But we're not going to do it here. And I think a big thing that led me to asking Aaron to do this episode about the crash was because with the show, it seems like any episode, even before the crash episode, I kept seeing in the comments people saying those poor girls, JFK Jr., you know, was an asshole, a lot of vitriol, which we had talked about in earlier in our Carolyn episode, that all this vitriol that was at Carolyn. And there's kind of I don't want to say been a switch, but kind of.

SPEAKER_00 11:09

There's been a reversal, especially younger people, people who don't have that emotional connection to John. Yes. As a kid that they grew up watching.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Right. So he's just a handsome, famous man, right? It's a very different group who are evaluating him.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

There's been a lot of, I'll mention it a little bit later. There's a woman who did ask not the Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, Maureen Callahan. She has a podcast and she's been doing series. She has a lot of hate for Carolyn and John. Oh, equal opportunity. People are getting a lot of information from there that is untrue. She is also a person who writes for the Daily Mail. And if you don't know the Daily Mail, we're not fans of them. When she's not talking about Carolyn and John now, which is earning her money, she usually talks about Harry and Meghan. She's somebody who has a lot of hate for a lot of people. That's why I know people want information. I'm not saying that we have the same reach as Maureen, but I would like to at least put our information out into the universe and hopefully people can make their own determinations. We're going to be pulling directly from the National Transportation Safety Board report, which was released July 2000. So it was a year after the crash.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Well, and I think that's the important thing for those who are just joining us to our podcast. Our background, I'm a history major. I taught history for 10 plus years as a social studies teacher. Aaron, basically, you had a history minor and you read a bunch of history, you're married to a history teacher. We want to stick to the facts. We want to pull primary and secondary sources. But then, of course, we also like the interesting and we like to speculate, and then obviously we make judgments at the end. But there's certain spots, like in this case, when it's a very sensitive topic, where, for example, Carolyn's last remaining Bassette sister is still alive.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Her mom's still alive. Contrary to reports, you'll see that she died in 2007. We do have verification that she is still alive, as well as her stepfather.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

When we're talking about living people, and I think we did a good job with that with Yoko and Tanya, we want to be conscious of that. Anyway, I know we're about 20 minutes in, although this will be edited, but let's talk about the crash.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

Yes. So again, I mentioned we're pulling it directly from the NTSB National Transportation Safety Board report. It's from that report that we know the cause of the accident was pilot error resulting from spatial disorientation. If you don't know what that means, we'll be talking about it. Obviously, we're gonna explain. A lot of the quotes are gonna be directly from that report.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

I know when we're talking about conspiracies, there are people who are like, oh, it exploded and there was a bomb on board, or there's even the more extreme of is it QAnon who say that he's gonna come and yeah, that he was gonna be Trump's VP.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

There's still people out there I've seen just today. I saw people are saying that they faked it and they're off living their lives somewhere. They wanted to get the heat off kind of what Prince Harry said that he hoped for years he thought that's what happened to his mom, or hoped in his heart of hearts that's what happened to his mom.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

Right. Again, this is official government document. Now you might be skeptical of the government.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

There are a lot of aviation experts. It's not just the government who's involved in putting this together. And it's the most reliable source of information, and it's readily available online. Search JFK Jr. Plane Crash Report, it's gonna pop up. It's not the most riveting reading. I read it a couple times, but if you want to know more, just go there. If you're finding information elsewhere outside of that report, it might not be factual. I've seen things said in online spaces that don't come from the report, and we can only believe or should only go off of what's on the report. Everything else I would be skeptical of.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

I can't be a hundred percent because again, like we said, uh the skepticism. But from what I've seen of those who were the Navy divers who saw and when they again pulled up the plane, which and stuff we'll talk about, that everything aligned with what the report said.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

We will talk about this. Is not an unusual kind of crash. The people involved are perhaps unusual and very public figures, but the crash itself is pretty normal, unfortunately. I never want to go in a small plane. I know, me neither. I hate regular planes, so the idea of a private plane. No, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 15:53

Yeah, I mean, I know not a lot of this happens, but I know we're gonna talk about spatial disorientation. The few times that I've flown overseas, I've had moments where I'm like, we're really close to the ocean. And I know it's not true. We are very far from the ocean, so I can only imagine being the pilot. Something that small. Yeah. And in this case, I'm a passenger. We're in a big old jet. Anyway, so let's let's let's get back to the report.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

I just up front, I do want to address there's a lot of misinformation. There are a few things I've seen online that I've seen most often that I want to address right up front. The autopsies confirmed that there were no drugs and alcohol in any of the three victims. It's right there in the report. John was not drunk and on painkillers, he had hurt his foot, which we will talk about, but he was not on any painkillers. I think this is another thing that Maureen Callahan has been toting around.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

I'm sure people again want to speculate because it's like, oh, and we've seen the show. If you've only seen the show, he's in a cast and he's on the cast. Like, oh, that would make sense. There's something that is going to impair you.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

But unfortunately, spatial disorientation that can happen very, very easily, even when you're completely sober. We'll go to John's foot that had been in a cast. That was also not an issue. He had heard it in a paragliding accident about a month and a half before the fatal plane crash. In our Carolyn series, we talk about that and how as a man who was very restless, that added to some of that stress that him and Carolyn were having because you have George magazine failing and Anthony, his cousin dying, and then now he's hurt and he can't do his usual things as the man who likes to play football in the park and very active person. And Carolyn knew that this would put a strain on the relationship, which it did. The boot that he had been wearing had only been taken off the day before the crash. Experts who did the report don't think that his foot would have played any role in the crash. There's a quote from an intimate oral biography, which is a book done by John's right-hand woman and assistant, Rosemarie Terenzio. You can see her in the show in the George Officings. In the book, there's a quote from a man who worked on the report who said, quote, we had a medical doctor on staff at the NTSB and he looked at that thoroughly. The evidence suggests he had a full range of his foot to be able to do what he needed to do for that flight. End quote. Some people say he should not have been flying, even with the cast removed, but it's clear from the report he didn't need to get that cleared by anyone after the injury. They don't think it had any impact on the ultimate tragedy that would unfold. So we can cross that one off. Mm-hmm. There are some people also who say he was not legally allowed to fly at night.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

This is one I hear a lot, people saying that about nighttime, because that idea of, oh, they left late and that he wasn't allowed to fly at night.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

He should have known. It's complicated. So he had flown at night before. One of his instructors clearly states in the report that, quote, the pilot, John, had the capability to conduct a night flight to Martha's vineyard as long as a visible horizon existed. End quote. We'll get multiple instructors quoted throughout the report because he did have a bunch of them in his many years of training. That is also controversial. If you go online, most people say it's better to have one consistent instructor instead of a bunch of instructors. I'm sure that's just another note. I will quote multiple instructors. They don't name them in the report, so I can't name them. That's from one of his instructors. We're gonna go back to that part about the horizon because he does mention as long as a visible horizon existed.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

I have not read the entire report, but I've read chunks of it, and talking about the horizon is obviously a big piece of it.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

However, the report also indicates that John had done very few night flights on his own, and hardly any of those flights had been in this exact plane as he had upgraded his plane. He had a new plane, a Piper Saratoga, which was much more powerful than the plane he had before. I'm not a plane person. I know you're not a plane person. A Piper Saratoga means nothing to me. I saw some context on the difference between the old and the new plane. One of John's friends said it's like going between, say, a Lexus and a Formula One car. That's a big difference in terms of power and speed and everything.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

One thing that I wanted to compare it to, and I wish I could find the actual episode from a podcast. Was it the Malcolm Gladwell? I kind of thought it was. Is it revisionist history? So this was back in season one called the Blame Game about the 2009-2010 Toyota unintended acceleration hysteria, that they wrongly blamed it on the actual faulty parts of the car, even though it was actually driver error. So pedal misapplication. A lot of people who have a car and either get a new car or rent a car, there's more chances of getting in accidents because it's brand new. And I can say this is somebody who had been in very few accidents, but one of them was backing up in a rental car while my other car was getting fixed because I was not used to how it moved. Rental car users and professional drivers who might not be accustomed to varied vehicles, new type of, in this case, obviously not a vehicle that you're driving, but something new.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

Mm-hmm. He's still learning.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

Right. It's not just, oh, all planes are interchangeable. I can say that as not a pilot. Right? Like you're not gonna go fly Delta jet the same way. You're gonna fly a different kind of like a pipe or Sarah. Toga.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

Yeah, we've got a big difference between his new plane and crucially, John had only logged 36 hours in this new plane. So 9.4 hours were at night. Of those 36 hours, three were without an instructor, and only about 0.8 hours of that time was flown at night, and 0.8 hours that calculates out to 48 minutes. So he had 48 minutes on his own of night flying.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

That actually was shocking to me because I did not think about the new plane. I had seen numbers of you know how many hours he had flown at night, but just flying in general. But when you talk about in that plane on his own at night, that I think is a shocking number.

SPEAKER_00 22:48

Yeah. It wasn't illegal for him to be flying at night without an instructor. But we could say it certainly wasn't smart seeing how little experience he had doing night flights on his own in that plane. Right. There's several layers here. The real problem is that he didn't know about the lack of visibility that night. As I said, we're going to come back to that in a moment because that is a big piece. We could discount the idea of drugs or John's injured left foot playing a role, but we can list that in experience of flying on this exact plane as issue number one in our long list of, we'll say, an avalanche of small mistakes that doomed the flight. We do know that the report blames spatial disorientation for the accident. I think it's important to put it into a context about how did that happen? Because we say that and people don't really know what that means. And they're like, well, how did he get disoriented? Right. What series of events caused that ultimate tragedy? Again, we're calling this anatomy of a crash, so we'll break it down.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

And I think that's important. I think you said like that avalanche of small mistakes, because like life, something might not have happened, right? If you take away A or B, this thing versus this thing, if there hadn't been that haziness, he might have been lucky and made it fine, right? Even with only that only 48 hours logged at night. But that didn't happen. All these factors, these things pile up on each other. Obviously, that risk factor goes up.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

Yeah, like you said, just one of these risk factors. Maybe it makes for an uncomfortable flight, but they make it. Obviously, there was too many. So we're gonna start with the weather, as I already mentioned that we come back to that. John had checked the weather forecast earlier in the day on July 16th, 1999. However, the issue is that the trio had expected to leave about 5, 6 p.m. on that day. And instead they had not left until almost 9 p.m. So we're gonna talk about the day of the crash when we talk about the episode. So I don't really want to talk about you know what they were up to that day. Or like why did they leave later? Was around 8 40 p.m. or so when they eventually did take off. If the plane had left at that earlier time as intended, sadly, as you said, the accident might never have happened because leaving later was not just making the trio perhaps a little too eager to get to their destination as quickly as possible, as we all are. You know, when you're when you're leaving late somewhere, you might not be as careful.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

You might be speedy or things like that.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Not as conscientious of what's going on, but it has another deadly consequence. It does not appear, John checked the weather after he left the city that day. So the weather information he had was outdated. What the weather was like at 5 p.m. was much different than what it ended up being like around 9 p.m. We all live with weather. Yeah. Weather changes very, very rapidly, especially on the water or near the water.

SPEAKER_01 25:56

I was about to say, when you bring in the water, that's a whole other factor.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

While the flight began under VFR, so visual flight rules, that's something John was certified in, which just means flying by sight. He's visually usually in the horizon to see. By the time the plane took off, visibility had been significantly reduced by the haze. Other pilots flying in that same area on the night of July 16th reported that the hazy conditions made the sky and the water just all blend together. So it's making it impossible to see where the air ended and the ocean began. With what the pilots relayed of the conditions in the air, even experienced pilots would have struggled flying that evening. There are some that said, yeah, I was supposed to do it, but I decided not to. There are three pilots who are quoted in the accident report. One in particular said that his GPS receiver told him that he was over Martha's vineyard. He had no idea. So he looked down and quote, there was nothing to see. There was no horizon and no light. I turned left to see Martha's vineyard to see if it was visible, but could see no lights of any kind, nor any evidence of the island. Thought the island might have suffered a power failure. Wow. So that tells you he was literally over it and he can't see anything.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

I know, flying, driving, not the same thing, but when it's dark, or even if you've been on a boat right in the dark, hazy with the water and the air. It's so hard to see with that haze. I can't even imagine, especially if that haze was so much that you can't see Martha's vineyard and you're flying over it, and that's an experienced pilot. And you think the whole island had a power failure. It's that bad. Exactly. That's another level. It's not just like we're talking about a little bit of fog. Especially if we're talking about because the key piece about JFK Jr. being able to fly with the visibility, there almost is no visibility. Although I know you're going to talk about instruments. It's not that he had no experience with instruments, which I know you're going to talk about next.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Yeah. So, like you said, with visibility that bad and nothing to latch on to on the horizon, John would have had to rely on those instruments in the plane to guide him. Although these are instruments in which he had not been fully certified. That wouldn't have, I don't think, been an immediate concern for him because it's not like he was completely clueless. He had been training to be instrument certified. This isn't something that's completely new.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

It wouldn't be like me going in a plane and being like, what do all these instruments mean?

SPEAKER_00 28:36

Well, all right, I'm just gonna start clicking things, just like you're in a show or something where you're just flipping up levers, flip switches, something's turning on. No, no, no. This is he's been training. One of his instructors noted in the report that John, quote, had the ability to fly the airplane without a visible horizon, end quote. But that same instructor mentioned that John, quote, may have had difficulty performing additional tasks under such conditions, end quote. You compare it to a car scenario, just because you have the ability to drive in the dark during a storm, you're not gonna be able to change the radio, or you're not gonna be texting at the same time. You're not gonna be able to do other things while you're doing it. And obviously, flying is a whole new beast.

SPEAKER_01 29:23

I think that's a good comparison. I think about driving in the haze in dark on ice in a new car, again, like a rental car or something. And say something goes off, one of those lights, like a check engine light, starts to go off, or something's making a noise. That muscle memory takes time and hours. And as Aaron had said, having only been in there 48 minutes at night and not under those conditions, you don't have that muscle memory. With my car, I've been in it enough years where something happens, right? That and my kids are talking to me as I'm, of course, merging into onto the interstate because that's when kids want to talk to you the most, or want that's when they want something is when you're you know merging onto the interstate.

SPEAKER_00 30:10

That's the most convenient time for them.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

Yeah, of course, yeah. Right when you're merging. Not as big of a deal because it's in my car. Usually, again, conditions are great, but having somebody, for those who don't know, I live in Minnesota. If it's in the middle of a snowstorm, even in the car that I'm used to, don't talk to me.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

Because again, you're white-knuckling, you're like, I just need to get to my destination.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Right. Your senses can only do so many things. Your senses are actually made to certain things shut down or zero in during that fight, flight, or freeze, you know, in those situations. If you're in a scenario, if you're driving in a snowstorm or something, and you're not even talking to anybody, but things get stressful, you tend to turn down the radio or what you're listening to, even though sound has nothing to do with it. I think you've learned that in a school shooting scenario from a CIA person.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

I've heard that before. If you want to concentrate, if you can't hear something, sometimes you'll shut your eyes and hearing is enhanced. The instructor is also quoted in the report saying that as of July 1st, 1999, so the beginning of the month, John was not ready for an instrument evaluation and required additional training, obviously. Training he never got to do. So he's done some pieces, but he's not ready for the final evaluation. He's not equipped to do that yet. So, you know, you've got a little bit of experience, but evidently not enough.

SPEAKER_01 31:37

That idea of not only not an expert, but not enough to pass a test on that.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Yeah. In a situation like this with that low visibility and the horizon and ocean just all blending into one, the instruments would have told John that there was an issue, that he wasn't flying level. The problem is when you get into spatial disorientation, the instruments are telling you one thing and your senses are telling you another. As humans, we tend to discount machines. You know, those break all the time. How many times has your phone told you something, or you Google something, you're like, no, that's not right.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

That's not, yeah, exactly. My phone is so old. I've got an iPhone 12, it just shuts down at night, or alarms like I'm showing alarm, but I'm not actually playing music.

SPEAKER_00 32:25

Yeah, we trust our gut, our ear, and people tell us to.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

People tell us to, right? They're like, trust your body, your instincts tend to be right.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

We trust our gut, our ears, our eyes, our body. It's a natural instinct. It's natural. But in the seat of a plane, it can be a fatal mistake to do that. And John's certainly not the first pilot to make that mistake. And sadly, he won't be the last. Even much, much more experienced pilots get tricked by this phenomenon where suddenly you don't know which way is up and down, you're not feeling the motions. The report says that spatial disorientation as a result of continued VFR, so visual flight rules, flight into adverse weather conditions. It's one of the top reasons for fatal plane crashes each year. This is not really necessarily a John issue. This happens unfortunately all the time. That sounds so scary, just to not know which way is up and down. I know. And if you are curious, there are videos online that attempt to recreate what it would have looked like. Okay, so this is not necessarily like the full disorientation. Obviously, it's hard to recreate that, but what it's looking like outside, it is not for the week. I'm already a scared flyer, so I I started watching one and then quickly exit, exit, exit.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

I just could not do it, but I have to watch. I just am curious that feeling. That's the hard part is we trust our body, our eyes, and our feelings.

SPEAKER_00 33:50

They can play tricks on us. Especially if you're not trained in the instruments, you'd be more apt to discount what you've been trained in. Or you go back and forth.

SPEAKER_01 34:00

Is it the instruments? Is it me? You're taking all this time to be thinking between that, and you're probably continuing to go with your gut. You're probably overthinking it.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

Just in these recreations, you can see that there's absolutely no differentiation of the water, the air, the horizon, anything. It's just a wall of haze and black nothingness. You might as well have your eyes closed in this case. And that loss of visual reference is dangerous enough on its own. And then your very body is working against you. Your inner ears, which anyone who dealt with vertigo, the inner ear area that's important for balance, those begin to feed you false data. It's lying to you. So they trick you into feeling like you're turning when you're flying straight or convince you. You're level when you're actually in a death spiral.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

That's scary. I know. Having I've only experienced vertigo once, but I was just doing Pilates and I went down and to some sort of move with my head down, and it moved just some inner ear crystals that they said. How much that just literally messes with your head, I cannot imagine flying a plane.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

And in this nothingness in feeling that, uh-huh. When the plane was a little over 30 miles from Martha's Vineyard, which is around 9 33 p.m., John began his descent that appeared to be an attempt to find that horizon beneath the haze. So he's just trying to find something. And he's so close. I know. They were it was like only a couple minutes away. I know. I hate that he's so close.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

In one of the quotes, they said in another three to five minutes, potentially. It's hard to speculate. We can't say a hundred percent, but he would have could have landed. You're so close.

SPEAKER_00 35:41

He had left the coastline, so there were no lights, nothing his eyes could rely on at that point. If he had hugged the coastline, people say the entire time and not gone over the ocean, things might have ended differently. I had heard that. The plane dropped at a rate of about 400 to 800 feet per minute, likely as John's trying to stay below the increasing haze to keep the ground or lights in sight. He's trying to find something desperately. Remember, he's only certified to fly based on sight, and that sight was failing in that bad weather. Then John did a right turn before going back up an erratic climb. So he's starting to go up and down, up and down. You can see again, if you look online, there are visual recreations of what the plane is doing. But his inner ears and his senses were ultimately making him feel at some point that he was going up when in fact he was going down. He is getting disoriented, which you can see as the plane started to do these unusual things. So scary. I know. At 9 39 p.m., the plane turned left and climbed once again to 2,600 feet before beginning another descent. This time much, much faster. A minute later at 9 40 p.m. while still descending, the plane did another sharp right turn. Again, when you're disoriented like this with those inner ears, you might not even realize that you're turning. Seconds later, the nose of the plane pitched down this time for that final time. John's body and likely Carolyn and Lauren's, I know that there's some speculation of would they have known if John didn't they probably all had that spatial disorientation. So their bodies were probably all telling them that he was level, but the instruments would have shown him that he was in this deadly spiral downwards towards the ocean. And at that point, it was the point of no return. The plane was in the graveyard spiral that they call.

SPEAKER_01 37:45

Yep, I've heard it.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

There's no going back at this point. There's no course correction. John could have done even if he had tried. At this point, you're too late for anything. And like I said, I know most people want to know the morbid question. Would John and the Bassette sisters have known what was happening? From everything I've seen, probably not. They would have probably all been equally confused and disoriented. To quote one of the men who worked on the accident report, quote, you see your airspeed go up and you don't quite know where you're at. I would expect that the pilot, so John, would be very confused and perhaps a little frightened because the instruments may not have been matching up with how he was feeling, end quote, which is what you were saying, Jamie.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:31

You're getting scared, and do you trust the instruments or do you trust your body? Especially if you're not trained, you know you're not trained in the instruments. Right.

SPEAKER_01 38:39

So you keep going back and forth and you have to make a decision.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

And nobody could see anything. So Carolyn and Lauren probably suffered that same issue as John, becoming absolutely disoriented. Both of them were in the backseats directly behind John. I know the show indicates that Carolyn was up front with her husband, but that's just creative license. She was found in the backseat. Ultimately, that last spiral would have been very, very quick. So there was only about, they say, 17 seconds from the time they diverted off the flight path to when they hit the ocean. Wow. I know 17 seconds sounds like a lot, but the the trio likely mercifully had very little clue what was about to happen. That same expert I just quoted said that there would have been probably some pressure. Carolyn and Lauren were probably being pushed down in their seats and some noticeable acceleration. You know, when you're in a plane, you can hear it on the wings, especially a small one. Right. But then before you could think about it more, they would have hit the water. We're talking about mere seconds. I know other people debate this, say that they would have known in the spiral or right at the end, but none of us will ever know. And the experts say no, so I'm going with no. Yeah. Let's take that route. In terms of the other mistakes, perhaps the most costly one is John refusing that offer of his instructor to fly with him. The offer had been made that day, but John had said he wanted to do it alone. You could see how some people read that as him having a death wish. There are people who say that Maureen Callahan says it was a murder suicide and that he did it on purposefully. It's the normal cockiness and comfort of someone who's flown just enough to be dangerous. We all done something just enough to be dangerous, and obviously in a plane that's exponentially higher risk. You thought his skills were better than they were. I just think of teenage drivers on the road. You think you're good.

SPEAKER_01 40:40

Even older drivers who don't want to give up their license, they're like, Well, I've been doing this. Especially with such a short flight, I can easily see, and it fits with his character of being, I don't want to say a little a little bit reckless.

SPEAKER_00 40:55

Yeah. He literally rides his bike around New York all the time. He he does reckless things all the time. So he doesn't have like a whole bodyguard surrounding him. Yeah. Some people are more risk averse than others, and he obviously was not one of those people. Right.

SPEAKER_01 41:13

It makes sense with his personality that he would be like, it's a short flight. I just want to do it. Right. Probably I want to get the experience, especially based on the conditions earlier in the day that he had seen.

SPEAKER_00 41:25

And how many people have turned down an offer if you're driving long distance and you're doing it alone? You're getting sleepy. Maybe you know, your parent or somebody offers to drive with you and you say no. We've all made those decisions. Most of the time, luckily it's gone okay, but in this case it did not. If he had had that instructor, most likely things would have been better. But again, this is just another mistake and uh a list of them, but maybe the most costly.

SPEAKER_01 41:55

And it I guess in some ways it's hard to call it fully a mistake because if he had landed, it would have been like, okay, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 42:03

See, I didn't need you. I didn't need an instructor.

SPEAKER_01 42:06

I would say definitely a big contributing factor that again, for people who would be more risk averse, this would be something that would be a protective factor in that flight that could have potentially again helped steer things a different way, but it's always 2020, right?

SPEAKER_00 42:26

I think that's true. Another baffling decision, perhaps equally so, was to not use autopilot. The plane was equipped with it, as confirmed by the report. The report says the autopilot was working, so it wasn't an issue that it was non-functional or anything like that at the time. John had used it in a flight with an instructor just earlier that month, and the instructor is quoted in the report saying he was competent with it, so he knew how to use it, he'd used it before. And we do think that John did use that autopilot as he flew along the coast, but he probably turned it off to begin his descent manually towards Martha's vineyard. Most experts believe that he had had it on at some point, then disconnected it to start that reproach, which is exactly when he started to get spatially disoriented and put that plane into the graveyard spiral. If he had kept it on longer, they likely would have made it safely. He could have used it to guide them until he saw the runway and then have disengaged it. Obviously, that's not what happened. Again, I think we could probably blame John once again for being overconfident, honestly. You know, in the chaos where you're disoriented, you're trying to correct it. He probably didn't even think about turning it on. There is some conflicting reports if he had flipped it on, if it would have helped at all. Some people say yes, other people say no. I don't know if it would have done anything at that point, but he could have used it to get all the way, perhaps, to the runway. But he did not.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

Right. And in some ways, like I said, it makes sense. You're about to land. You're getting close.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

Yeah, we talked about how close he was. We're not talking about transatlantic flight and he's doing it in the middle of the ocean. He knows he's really close to Martha's vineyard.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

So he's like, I'm preparing to land, I'm gonna get out of autopilot, and then obviously things went so fast from there.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

Yeah, again, the the timing and the report does break down the timing. It's very quick. It's very quick. We've all been in situations where something something happens and snowballs really quickly. Those minutes probably feel like hours, but they're not. Wasn't enough time. Those are the main issues that are cited in the report. Again, you can read them all online. There is more, like if you want to know about the plane, it does break down that the plane's in good shape, all that. There's no blame in terms of malfunction there.

SPEAKER_01 44:54

I guess I can say too, for those who are the more conspiracy, all bodies were recovered. We're not going to go into body speculation or how they are found, but there was a recovery. It's not like, again, John is out there.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

It's not mysterious. Yeah, it's not mysterious in that way.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

All of them were found and cremated. The show does show that accurately and sent out basically the burial at sea.

SPEAKER_00 45:19

To conclude this discussion, was John at fault? Undoubtedly. That's exactly why he had to pay Carolyn and Lauren's family in their wrongful death lawsuit, which they did file against the Kennedys afterwards. And we mentioned how he had this reckless streak. He felt invincible. And for most of his life, the world reflected that feeling back to him. He wasn't necessarily wrong to feel invincible.

SPEAKER_01 45:45

He had an earlier kayaking incident with a college girlfriend where that was dangerous.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

Yeah, I've read her memoir. She talks about that. That was part of his makeup. But I I do think that this intense vitriol that you see that you mentioned towards John online and elsewhere, I just find a little bit hyperbolic. John, he's a Kennedy, but despite being a Kennedy, he's not particularly special in this aspect. We already mentioned that this is a very, very common reason that airplanes crash. Right. People do reckless things every damn day. Men fly their entire families in planes and crash. People rock climb, they free solo. That free solo guy, he was literally just had a Netflix special about climbing a whole ass building. They summit mountains for the sheer thrill and they die for it. Yeah. And you look at doctors who make mistakes that cost patients their lives on that table. My problem is that none of these people seem to attract the level of vitriol that John does. And obviously, a large part of that is John being a public figure. So therefore, he he gets a lot of hate for the mistakes he made. And he clearly made many mistakes, which we've already listed. We've talked about them. These mistakes, they ultimately cost him and Carolyn and Lauren their lives. For me, I think if he had survived and the women had died, yeah, I would feel much more hatred, derision towards him. But since he paid the ultimate price for the cumulative mistakes he made, I just feel like there has to be some nuance there. The things people loved about him in life now are the things people rake him over the coals with in death. I talked about the riding in the streets of New York City and traffic.

SPEAKER_01 47:36

Oh, every everybody has a JFK Jr. story because he was everywhere and he was an everybody. He wasn't like a celebrity. Everybody has their story. They love that. He could have been surrounded by bodyguards 24-7 and nobody gets near him.

SPEAKER_00 47:52

That's, I mean, part of the reason he was able to develop that sort of reckless streak. I'm sure every one of you, myself included, you know, friends who are a little bit reckless, maybe not to this extent. They probably don't have private planes. You know, people who live a little bit on the edge and they like it.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

There's a lot of hobbies that are like you were just talking about climbing, like rock climbing or climbing without delay, going to Everest, even buying private planes.

SPEAKER_00 48:20

Those crash literally so often.

SPEAKER_01 48:23

Oh, I feel like so much.

SPEAKER_00 48:25

Yeah, and how many times it's like an entire family is completely obliterated. I just find it funny that we reserve most of our anger towards John and not towards these people. I'm loath to defend a man. Do you know this is not natural to me? I don't want to make it sound that way. There are some people, uh, Maureen Callahan, who we mentioned, who are going with this idea that he had this death wish and murder suicide.

SPEAKER_01 48:54

Oh that's bullshit. 100%. It does not fall in line with how he's treated people or how he would go out. There's all these little errors. If it was purposeful, why wouldn't it be at the beginning? Or why wouldn't it be, I guess, more dramatic in some ways? Like this, as you said, is a very common cause of plane crashes. To plan it out that way would be very odd. Let me be really disoriented and crash into the ocean.

SPEAKER_00 49:23

He's a very unique figure, but again, there's nothing unique about this. I think the reason that people latch on to these ideas of murder, suicide, and all that, it's it's a way out. It's a cop out. It's a way of reckoning with the terrifying, mundane reality that a series of mistakes, however small, as you said, can snowball and result in complete disaster. It can cost us our lives and those around us. And that's not as salacious as a theory, as murder suicide. We want our heroes to be heroes, our villains to be villains. So I think that's why people are comforted by a fact, you know, maybe he did this on purpose.

SPEAKER_01 50:05

Right. Or I think even just the anger towards him. I would never do that. Those poor girls, because of his recklessness, which which is true. You can say that, and you can say at the same time, you can hold the fact that there were all these culminating factors. Again, if one thing hadn't lined up, things might have been differently, right? Simple as if there hadn't been haze that day or less haze, they would have left an hour earlier. He would have had a an instructor. We don't know, but one of those things differently, it would have been a mundane flight. We never would have heard about it in history books of them going to a wedding. Unfortunately, that's not obviously how things turned out. And we can then, just as this report says, it is pilot air. And I think we can still at the same time have sympathy for him because just like somebody who doesn't realize they're over their head until they're over their head.

SPEAKER_00 51:06

You're swimming out to ocean and suddenly you're a little bit deeper than you thought. Right. You know, that that happens so quick.

SPEAKER_01 51:12

Or there's a riptide I can relate. I remember in Mexico when I was swimming at one point on a vacation, and it was like, Oh, this is nice with the waves, and I'm not a good swimmer. And then they were getting the waves were getting harder and a little more intense. Then I started freaking out, and then by the time I made it back to shore, obviously it was like, Oh, I would not have done that again, you know, if I had known. But again, you're not a great swimmer. Why did you swim out there? Right. You can say all those things like why when you when the first wave gave you that idea, like, why didn't you go back then?

SPEAKER_00 51:45

Unfortunately, I think we all every day we have moments, obviously on a much smaller scale. Right.

SPEAKER_01 51:52

But we're in a rush leaving out the door. You have kids or you don't have kids, you're running late, you just back up behind you. That's how with my rental car, I hit a car, a car parked on the side because 99% of the time there was never a car parked on the street behind our driveway. At the time it was that 1% of the time, there was, right? And so 99% of the time I went to have been in an accident. You're okay. And obviously, in that case, it wasn't fatal. That's the problem, is the 99% of the time you're okay. That one percent of the time, those factors, I was late, so I wasn't looking at the backward camera, I wasn't like paying attention, I was just using muscle memory. I'm like, I gotta go. I was thinking about the future ahead, and that happened, right? And I think that happens to a lot of us. We can say yes, as I said, pilot error, it wasn't like the plane malfunctioned or anything like that, but I think you can still hold some empathy for John, obviously.

SPEAKER_00 52:54

Like, yeah, like you said, he also died, he paid the price. Yeah, he paid the price. I think we're so easy, especially online, to pull out something like that and be like, that dooms him, erases everything else about him. Mm-hmm. There was a lot of reasons why it happened as it did.

SPEAKER_01 53:13

It's sad all around. Right. Whether he was famous or not, it's a tragedy, and there were all these factors that led up to it.

SPEAKER_00 53:20

But like you said, in some ways, it isn't as salacious or it's not salacious besides the people who are involved. It happens all the time in aviation, right?

SPEAKER_01 53:33

And it's obviously that's a risk as a pilot. You take risks flying, and he made that decision to fly that day based on factors. I think we also can get lost in our brain too. I was thinking about when you said he hadn't checked the weather since he had left. I think we still again think in our 2026 brains, and we're like, oh, well, you check on your phone. Why wouldn't you? You know what I mean? You don't have your iPhone to check the weather and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 54:00

It's a different world. If you're running late, you're probably a little miffed that you're not getting off on time and it just slips your mind. Obviously, as a pilot, that was his due diligence. He should have done that, but he didn't do that that one day. Most days that might not have an impact, but it did this day. It's just unfortunately a long list of things that happened, and he he is culpable for a lot of them. But yeah, I do think hopefully we've made you understand more of the the gray. Yeah, the gray and the situation and the situation that happened. It's easy to read this report, but even to me, I'm not gonna say I understood 100% of it because there's a lot of aviation information and not a pilot, not wanting to be a pilot. So hopefully, at least we've been able to summarize the important pieces in it to help you understand what happened.

SPEAKER_01 54:55

I really appreciate Aaron. Like I said, I think some key things that stuck out with me were a lot of sources talk about how many hours at night, but they don't talk about in that particular plane. I think that piece about just again, his instructors noting. It's not that he didn't have any training in instruments, so it's like again, not like one of us sitting in there and just staring at these instruments that mean nothing. But obviously was not equipped to deal with that level of an emergency situation.

SPEAKER_00 55:27

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 55:28

He didn't know of until he was in it. There's no going back at that point. Yeah. Yeah, the sad ones. It is. At the end of the day, three people lost their lives, and at the end of the day, it was an accident. And an accident due to culminating factors. Were there things that he should have done? Yes, but at the end of the day, I don't think that level of he was not intending to go out there and never come back. I think that's pretty clear. So we're gonna do, as we said, another episode breaking down love story in general, kind of the show itself, and then our Kennedy series. I was gonna do Ted Kennedy for the main feed, and then I started reading the Ted Kennedy biography, and I was like, holy moly, in the first 10 pages, Rose. I knew Joe Sr. was a piece of work. I started reading and I was like, I was like, Rose is reminding me kind of of Lucille Bluth, but not in a fun way.

SPEAKER_00 56:26

I know, I you told me that, and I was like, Lucille Bluth derogatory, so we're not or not complimentary, not a fun Lucille Bluth.

SPEAKER_01 56:35

Um, and so I was like, okay, I need a biography on Rose. So I'm doing Rose, so we're doing the parents of JFK, Erin and I together. I think that will be awesome. That'll be on the main feed. As I said, we have a giveaway until April 10th. Again, you can enter by rating. Rating, you have to let us know. So you can email us or comment under the Instagram. Reviewing, you don't have to let us know. We'll see the little piece. If you've reviewed in the past, you already have an entry. So don't be like, well, I've already reviewed. You already have an entry. If you join our Patreon for free, get another entry. And then you had again two if you're on one of the paid levels. You can also listen to our full episode of our first love story podcast. We, I think, released about 20 minutes on the main feed, but we have, I think, a whole hour, hour and a half of love story. And as we said, we still have one more coming for love story, but we're not done with the Kennedys.

SPEAKER_00 57:33

If you're a Kennedy fan, get ready. If not, well, tough baby. Won't be forever.

SPEAKER_01 57:39

And if you're a William the Conqueror fan, William part two. William part two is is complete, as in the script's complete, we're ready to record. That will happen. So if you're like, okay, what's up with William? And maybe you thought the same with Toussaint because it seems to happen with Jamie. William will be covered. We'll finish William. We have his end of his story when we have got our Kennedy series here. And if you really have a strong opinion on who we should cover next, a great place to join is our Patreon or send us an email. Go to our Instagram. As I said, Aaron rocks it on the Instagram. So go see some of those even old shorts. I like to watch and and watch them back. I think they're great little previews and they're just a great little kind of tell a little story ahead of time or even after the fact. Like I said, I'm getting to see how Aaron portrays those podcasts visually.

SPEAKER_00 58:36

Thanks for listening to the episode and we will talk soon. Bye, guys.

SPEAKER_01 58:41

Bye. Again, we appreciate all listeners. Thank you.