From what I understand his flight training was at a critical juncture. He happened into a situation which required him to focus on his instruments and ignore his intuition. In other words, he failed the acid test.
Does anyone think he would have failed in politics too? Of course Democrats never fail in Identity Politics.
He was only part way through his instrument training and experienced one of the more common killers in general aviation: flying into Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC). For those pilots not proficient in instrument navigation (like JFK, Jr.), it can be a sure killer, and in his case it was.
He was not instrument rated. He took off in the late afternoon for a destination that would have required him to fly VFR in the dark. That alone was a recipe for disaster. Unless, of course, there was a qualified pilot flying right seat. According to several media reports soon after the plane disappeared, witnesses at the New Jersey general aviation airport where they took off reported seeing another male seated in the right front seat but only three bodies were still strapped in were recovered. My wife’s cousins who were working in Manhattan at the time and long time Westchester County residents with heavy Democrat credentials told her that JFK Jr. was going to announce his bid for the vacant Senate seat the Monday morning after the wedding. It’s not hard to imagine a storyline whereby an operative posing as a flight instructor got on the plane with a ‘chute in a carryon, disabled the three innocents, set the autopilot, bailed out the right door and got picked up by a waiting speedboat. Et voila!! Unimpeded campaign and election for the new U.S. Senator from New York.
I for one am glad that fate intervened as it did. Just look at the 20th-anniversary crapola, which will emphasize the tragedy and assess none of the responsibility (he killed two other people with his recklessness) and imagine if he had entered politics. Yuck. HRC was pretty bad in her interlude as NY Senator, but the media would have had him running for the Presidency in the middle of his first Senate term. Their tongues planted in his posterior.
My favorite memory of the search and rescue phase of the story was a prankster of Howard Stern's following who managed to call into ABC news and convince the morons there that he was a Coast Guard Commander directing the search. He gets patched in to speak with Peter Jennings live and runs on for a while with a sufficiently jargon-laden spiel that even had me thinking he might have been real. Then he indicates that "Capt. Baba Booey is on the scene." and I laughed out loud. Peter Jennings did not catch it and went on talking to the guy for several minutes, then cut to commercials. When he came back he had been clued into the scam. His attitude was so dismissive - of course here we are burying our Prince and this vulgarians dare to make fun....
He was a low-time non-instrument rated pilot flying over water at dusk. No nefarious conspiracies needed.