Crashing The Party, Which Is To Say, The Plane

Celebrating a Deathday™: Flying ace John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Jr. and her sister Lauren crash-or-rather-splash-landed their Breitling HP biplane in the Atlantic Ocean on this day July 16, 1999. The victims died upon impact. Bloody hell, isn’t that how life is? One minute you’re flying high, en route to the wedding of your cousin Rory, son or possibly daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, and the next minute the Navy divers find you at the bottom of the ocean floor? The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) believed the crash/splash was a result of Kennedy’s "spatial disorientation and inability to maintain control of the aeroplane during a descent over water at night,” but methinks the beefcake pilot was up against something more distressing than escalating turbulence. Crikey, I barely survived a leisurely train ride with the missus and her sister, let alone keeping a plane aloft whilst two frenzied sister birds protested my wing-walking ways, hollering their heads clean off, as it were. If there’s any blessing in this tragedy, it’s that John-John (pictured here at the Stunt Pilot Academy Fairgrounds the week prior) would surely have never heard the end of it had they all survived. Unfortunately, ‘twasn’t so. On July 21, the victims’ ashes were scattered from the deck of the USS Briscoe off the coast of Martha Stewart’s Vineyard. Happy Anni-hearse-ary™ and RIP, Citizens Intrepid.