Cornerstone Series

Cornerstone. The “cornerstone” is the first stone that is set when you start building with stone or brick. It’s the most important part of the building because the position of all the other stones or bricks are determined by the cornerstone. [Hold up piece of paper or bulletin.]

Imagine that this the cornerstone. Looks pretty square. Can you tell just by looking it? Seems like it is but if is off by as little as one degree, it can throw the whole building off. In one foot, your line in both directions will be off by .2 inches. Doesn’t seem like very much, amen? But if you’re building a church or a huge office building or skyscraper, your building could be off by 20 inches or 1.6 feet … in both directions … by the time you finish … and that can be a problem.

This can be a big problem and even cost you your life in situations like flying. One degree of error equals one mile for every 60 miles you fly. So, let’s say you start flying from Asheville to Washington, DC, which is a distance of just over 500 miles. If you are off by one degree, you will be 83 miles off course and miss DC completely. If the rockets carrying the astronauts to the moon were off by one degree, they would have missed the moon by 4,169 miles. What a difference a degree can make, amen?

[Hold up paper/bulletin again.] If such a slight variation can have such dire consequences, seems like it would be extremely important to know if you are so much as off by one degree, am I right? Well, look at this paper with the naked human eye, can you tell? I’m guessing it’s probably off by more than a degree but I can’t tell, can you? So how can we tell? Well, fortunately we have instruments that can tell us if this piece of paper is off by as small as a hundred thousandth of a degree … maybe even more. The problem is whether we trust the instruments or our own eyes.

Getting off course is very easy when you’re flying a plane. Cars are confined to the road so we only have to pay attention to what’s in front of us or behind us. We only have to think “horizontally” but you have to think vertically as well as horizontally when you’re flying a plane. When we’re driving a car, we only have to follow the road but there are no roads in the sky, no lines to follow so you have to constantly check your direction and make constant course corrections. Visual checks … like looking out your window … is helpful but what if you can’t see? Say you’re flying at night or flying through the clouds. Not only could you be going in the wrong direction horizontally but vertically as well. You could be going up or down and not even know it. That’s what they think happened to John J. Kennedy, Jr. on July 16th of 1999.

It was a hazy, moonless night when JFK Jr, his wife, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister, Lauren Bessette, took off from Essex County Airport in New Jersey and headed towards Martha’s Vineyard in Dukes County, Massachusetts, to attend a wedding. The wedding was in Hyannis Port but they were dropping off Carolyn’s sister, Lauren, at Martha’s Vineyard before heading to Hyannis Port for the wedding. Unfortunately, something went awry an hour into the flight and the plane crashed into the ocean and all three passengers were killed.

As you may recall, there was a long and thorough investigation and a lot of speculation about the cause of the crash but the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the crash was caused by an inexperienced pilot who had become disoriented in the dark and lost control of the plane. Although John F. Kennedy Jr. had 300 hours of flight experience, including five night flights, he did not hold an instrument rating and was only certified to fly under visual flight rules.

“Atmospheric conditions along Kennedy's flight path on the night of the crash were occasionally hazy, which can lead to spatial disorientation for pilots. The weather was officially listed as ‘visual meteorological conditions’ (VMC), which allowed Kennedy to fly under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) rather than Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), especially since he lacked an instrument rating. The visibility was very poor in Essex County, New Jersey, and airports along Kennedy's flight path reported visibility between five and eight miles with haze and a few clouds. Some pilots flying similar routes as Kennedy on the night of the accident reported no visual horizon over water because of haze.” (wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_Jr._plane_crash)

With no land in sight, no horizon, and no moon to visually guide him, the only thing that JFK, Jr., had to guide him was his instruments. The problem with flying by instrument is that it is rather unnerving to trust your fate to a bunch of mechanical and electrical devices when you can’t see and often inexperience pilots will trust their physical instincts over what their instruments tell them … often to their demise. For example, it can feel like you’re going straight when you’re actually turning because of the fluid in your middle ear. Because you think that you’re not turning you can over turn and enter what is called a “graveyard spiral.” A graveyard spiral not only feels like you’re still turning but that you’re losing attitude, which is natural in a turn, but you are so disoriented by this time that you overcompensate and end up going into a tail spin and, if you don’t know what’s happening, end up crashing. The solution is to trust your instruments.