When you're rich or famous enough to afford your own plane and fly it yourself, the chances of dying in a plane crash go Way up.
JFK junior would still be alive if he was an ordinary private pilot, because there's No Way they would have allowed a regular pilot to fly a plane at night without an IFR license.
Think of all the plane and helicopter crashes that involve rules being bent for the famous who need to get where their going on private planes and helicopters?
Holly couldn't afford a plane. He and Ricky Nelson and Eddie Cochran could afford bikes and rode together. Nelson and Cochran were murdered. The death of Holly and 3 others amounted at least to 1st degree manslaughter or 3rd degree murder and probably 1st degree murder.
Before the transistor, the jukebox industry to controlled the record market. Organized crime controlled the jukebox industry. Politicians approved because gangsters segmented the population, choosing some music for blacks, other music for whites, some for country people, others for urban areas, etc. The transistor made it possible to hear good fidelity in bedrooms and cars. Eclectic DJs began finding large audiences. Young Americans began listening to a mix of city, country, white and black performers. They called it rock and roll. Artists could succeed without organized crime.
The tour that killed Holly involved 4 stars particularly threatening to the status quo. Peggy Sue's brother serviced Air Force jukeboxes. He gave her rhythm-and-blues records he had removed for newer stuff. Through her, Holly learned to perform the genre well enough for black audiences in addition to country music for urbanites.
Richie Valens wrote and performed Hispanic music that the mainstream loved. When Dion's record company made him record with backups of its choosing, he called the result "white bread." He demanded to record with friends from his Italian neighborhood. The mainstream loved it. The Big Bopper wrote and performed rock and roll besides being a popular disk jockey.
Normally, performers didn't tour the upper midwest in January because travel conditions could be bad and distances great. Normally, tour dates were set up to minimize travel time and expense, but this schedule crisscrossed a huge area. Normally, performers toured in big, comfortable intercity buses, but this time it was an unreliable retired school bus with a harsh ride, upright seating, and deficient heating. The company that organized the tour had been in the business for decades. They knew what they were doing: hoping to destroy careers by forcing cancelations or making stars drop out due to illness; the organizers had docile hopefuls waiting to replace them.
They ran into a spell where it was way below zero. When the bus broke down, they didn’t even have the inadequate heater. They were stranded for hours because it was so cold almost no vehicles were out to spot them and contact the state police. One member was hospitalized with frostbite.
If the organizers wanted the tour to make money, they would have switched to passenger trains, but they didn’t. Holly was so desperate that he found two other stars who would pool their money to charter a small plane so they could spend one night in a hotel and not on a freezing bus.
Peggy Sue had been having nightmares about it for months. When she read about the crash, she recognized the V tail and the paint scheme from her dreams, but in her dreams, it had been brown and white, not red and white. When Holly boarded the plane around midnight at a dirt-strip airport, the lighting would have made red look brown.
In her dreams, Holly and the pilot were talking when the plane suddenly banked 90 degrees left and crashed. In fact, it banked 90 degrees right, but her dreams were consistent with what Holly would have perceived.
The Civil Aeronautics Board blamed the pilot, first for taking off in IFR conditions when he didn’t have an IFR rating, and second for being unfamiliar with the aircraft. They claim he was so unqualified that he read the attitude indicator backwards, but their description of the evidence, how the instrument was found, is phrased so that you don’t know which way it said they banked.
Like the FAA, the CAB was in the pocket of the airline industry. The CAB was so corrupt that one of LBJ’s first actions was to replace it with the NTSB.
The pilot’s record showed that he had an instructor’s rating and in flight time in that type of aircraft, he was highly qualified. Eight months ago, he’d completed his 15 hours of instrument instruction and 40 hours of instrument flight but fail his check flight.
That’s not surprising. Pilots with instrument ratings often crashed because they were slow to notice their attitude indicator is malfunctioning. Presumably, a check pilot disables it while the student is in a distracting situation, then observes whether he notices the discrepancy between instruments in time to keep the plane straight and level.
After WWII, a pilot had bulldozed the runway to start a flying service. A farmhouse was the terminal. An airline decided they wanted to stop there once a day, so the FAA made his private strip public. They sent an air traffic controller who set up his office in the house and took charge of flight operations. The owner was now responsible to keep his landing strip open in case a passing airliner decided to drop in. He wasn’t free to fly passengers, so he hired the younger pilot.
Most attitude indicators ran by vacuum. The Bonanza was unusual in having an electric one. It had been found that if the plane had sat outdoors in sub-zero temperatures, the gyro would need an hour to warm enough to come up to speed. Otherwise, it would be dangerously unstable. The FAA was supposed to send safety bulletins to all operators of this model.
A toppling gyro would be a much better explanation than claiming the pilot couldn’t read the instrument correctly. It was his responsibility to turn it on in time to warm up. The report doesn’t mention the possibility that the gyro hadn’t been warmed up. The only reason I see not to mention it is that the evidence at the scene showed that the gyro had toppled, and the FAA was at fault for failing to inform the operator of the need for a warmup.
They were headed for Moorhead, MN, 365 miles north. The National Weather Service said a front was coming in from the north, making it uncertain whether they could complete the flight. Whether or not the pilot had an instrument rating, flying into a storm was dangerous. Either way, his responsibility was to keep track of weather reports and if necessary, divert to another airport.
The air traffic controller had a teletype machine to receive weather reports and bulletins. The owner and the pilot were worried. In the hour before the flight, they had gone to his office several times to ask about the weather and be present in case a bulletin came in. The uneasy pilot made his last check by radio from the runway. The controller assured him that for now, the weather was clear to Moorhead.
In fact, a weather bulletin had been on his desk for half an hour. A squall line with heavy snow and dangerous gusts was headed for him at high speed. The worried owner noted that the tail light rose to about 800 feet and leveled off. It seems the pilot had encountered a much lower ceiling than he’d been told. The light suddenly disappeared. That would mean they’d run into the heavy snow.
Turbulence probably toppled the gyro. An alert pilot can use a compass to reorient, but the same turbulence would make a magnetic compass useless. That’s why airplanes have gyro compasses. His was still caged. They’re normally set after takeoff, and he hadn’t had time. Blind and without an attitude indicator or compass, what pilot could have recovered?
Without identifying the crash or presenting any evidence, the report began with a conclusion, that this was yet another fatal crash caused by a pilot who took off in IFR conditions when he didn’t have an IFR rating. The owner objected, saying that the pilot had depended on the FAA for weather information, and the FAA (controller) had misinformed him. The CAB said even if the controller lied to the pilot, the pilot was at fault.
Suppose he’d had an instrument rating and the instruments had worked perfectly. The storm could still have killed everyone on board. The cause of the crash was misinformation from the controller, but to this day the government tells us it was the fault of one of the victims.
To misinform the pilot repeatedly when the bulletin was on his desk shows at least a disregard for the lives of the pilot and passengers. That’s manslaughter. It’s hard to believe no malice was involved, toward the pilot or toward rock and roll. That motive would make it first degree murder. The music died, and Denver showed up in Lubbock.
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