In the mind of a professional pilot, the circumstances of the Kennedy accident stir uncomfortable images. Here is a pilot who has flown enough to earn his private pilot's licence and hardly any more, yet he departs for a night flight over the sea in hazy conditions without filing a flight plan.
Even while it is still not certain that there was no technical fault to cause the crash, the circumstantial evidence for pilot error is building up. There was certainly no emergency call advising air traffic control of problems, and the aircraft was descending toward its destination airfield.
To fly safely in the conditions which Mr John F. Kennedy jnr faced, he needed to be qualified in instrument flying, what used to be called "blind flying". Instrument flying means being able to fly with no reference to the outside world, just by scanning the flight instruments.
The key instruments are the artificial horizon, the air-speed indicator, the altimeter, the compass and the vertical speed indicator. Mr Kennedy's aircraft had all these, but flying by instruments alone is a skill which has to be learned and then practised regularly.
Mr Kennedy had not broken any laws by failing to file a flight plan for his private flight, nor by getting airborne at night when his training had fitted him for flying by day in good weather. He was, however, very unwise, and that verdict would, among professional pilots, have been the same even if he had successfully completed his flight.
Even experienced pilots have flown aircraft into the sea at night because they did not know how close they were to its surface. In May this year seven people died in a small airliner on an island-hopping flight in the South Pacific. The pilot was also on his final approach to the destination airport.
There is no equivalent experience to be had, on the surface of the Earth, to the sensation of flying an aeroplane on a hazy night over the sea. And that is the problem for the new pilot. There is nothing that prepares him for the sensation of hanging motionless in a void. The surface of the sea is invisible, so there is no sense of progress or height.
Stars may be visible between clouds and haze, but if there is a fishing boat on the sea ahead it looks just like another star in the void. There is no sense of it being above or below you.
The real danger comes when the destination airfield appears in the distance. Not only does the pilot now have to busy himself preparing for landing and concentrate on carrying out the early descent, but a sense of relief and confidence can make the pilot relax too much.
There is a temptation to believe that the scattered lights in the distance give you all the visual information you need to fly safely. That is the aviation equivalent of Sirens luring ships on to the rocks. It is what pilots call a black hole approach.
Since the pilot still has no visual sense of height he has to check his altimeter regularly to prevent the descent continuing into the invisible sea. A line of lights on the shore may not actually be parallel to the real horizon, but the pilot can be tempted to believe that they are, and "level" the wings appropriately.
This can put the aircraft into a slight bank, which starts a turn, and then the pilot's senses of what is real, and what is not, start to conflict. This is the beginning of disorientation. It can happen even to experienced pilots, but they know how to deny what they feel and believe the instruments, settling the aircraft back on a straight course.
The fact that the Piper Saratoga hit the sea so hard makes this look more like a case of disorientation rather than descending slowly into the sea, but that will become clear in the next few days.
David Learmount is operations and safety editor of Flight International magazine