Should He Have Flown?

Some question whether Kennedy was capable of handling the conditions, and the plane, that night

Even as tears were being shed and tributes read following the crash of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane, a troubling question became hard to ignore: Should he have taken off that night? In a family famous for its appetite for risk, Kennedy was far from the most reckless. Yet he didn't shrink from pushing the edge of his personal envelope. Last Friday he may have pushed too far, as a deadly combination of too much airplane and too green a pilot apparently proved disastrous.

When the first details of the crash of Kennedy's Piper Saratoga emerged on Saturday, some experienced pilots...

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