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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

When JFKjr's crash was in the news, I phoned him up and asked what he thought the cause was.

He didn't hesitate: "Spacial disorientation"

Aka pilot incompetence. Airplanes don't care if you're a celebrity or not.

That's a little too dismissive. Flying in those conditions is deeply disorienting, and you have to have instrument training (and discipline) to safely accomplish it. My dad (also air force pilot, F-104, and later, bush pilot) was flying near Block Island at the same time, and despite his training and experience said it was difficult and disorienting. You need to be rated for instruments and have developed trust in them, despite your senses.

JFK jr knowingly flew into haze without proper training. He had incidental instrument flying instruction, but was not rated for it. He was late and suffered from get-there-itis, a common killer of pilots.

My dad worked for a while as an instrument flying instructor. He said the big hurdle was to learn to trust the instruments and ignore your body screaming at you that the instruments are lying.

Your dad is exactly correct.

He flew F-104s? I'm so jealous! As a teen, I lived near Luke AFB. I had a military ID, and would bicycle onto the base and head to the flight line. Luke was training Luftwaffe pilots at the time to fly F-104s. They'd start down the runway, and halfway down would light the afterburners. Boom! Followed by a gigantic flame shooting out the back. They'd take off at a steep angle with the most delightful thunder.

I was so sorry to have to turn in my ID when I turned 21.

I wanted to be an AF pilot, but the recruiting officer reluctantly said I could never be a pilot because of my glasses. And so I went into writing compiler :-/

Anyone who's interested can go down to the local small airfield and ask an instructor to show you "unusual attitudes" - he'll have you sit in the seat with your head looking down, do things and then ask you what the plane is doing - then you look up and realize it's doing the exact opposite.

At night with no visible horizon - you do it to yourself.

That's exactly how instrument training is done. The student wears a hood so he can only see the instruments. The instructor puts the airplane in various situations where your senses lie, and the student has to recover.

My dad, against orders, carried a piece of pipe with him, to ensure the student would not panic and kill them both. He said he never had to use it.

I assume the pipe was to club the student pilot unconscious in order to recover control of the aircraft.

yup, thereby saving both of their lives.

I really was hoping to make a lead pipe cryptanalysis rhyming reference but neither I nor Gemini can make it work, and I don't want to go get my thesaurus and rhyming dictionary to work something out.

Lead pipe crash avoidance closest I could get.

Lead pipe for student paralysis.

It wasn't lead. Steel.

I had paralysis as an option but, imo, a good rhyme would have the same cadence, and adding the "for" or "with" messes up the cadence. "no place like home for the holidays" -> "no plate like chrome for the hollandaise".

> He said the big hurdle was to learn to trust the instruments and ignore your body screaming at you that the instruments are lying.

In about 1967, my dad (career USAF, fighter jock) was flying in clear, sunny weather. He started to get bad vertigo, so he did an emergency, instruments-only landing at a nearby AF base. He said that on final approach, he "knew" he was upside down, and that it was all he could do to refrain from rolling the airplane "right side up" for touchdown on the runway.

Wow! Smart man, your dad.

A superior pilot uses their superior judgment to avoid needing their superior skills.

Getting disoriented in those conditions is expected. Knowingly flying into those conditions without an instrument rating is very bad judgment.

His flight instructor offered, or really pleaded, to make the flight with him. It was clearly beyond his skills, but the Kennedeys had a long history of surviving reckless actions.

You and the commenter I was responding to are correct that the conditions were disorienting, and he should not have been flying without an instrument rating, but I bristled at the cheap shot.

> When JFKjr's crash was in the news, I phoned him up and asked what he thought the cause was.

Um, what?!? .... ohhhh, you phoned your dad.

My dad flew in two wars, bombers and fighters and transports, propeller and jet, for 23 years. He also was an instructor for instrument training, and was given the job of accident investigation for a while. He ran base operations at Galena AFB in the Vietnam war. He owned thousands of books on aviation, wrote two books about it, and wrote articles for aviation magazines and books.

Why wouldn't I ask his opinion?

He, like me, was confused for a second and thought that you called JFK Jr after the crash.

haha, sorry about that

More to the point here: why wouldn't you make that clear to the reader, who wondered how you called the afterlife?

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