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The US doesn't really have licenses or endorsements for individual small aircraft (or even have that specialized training, with one singular exception, and Jr. had a complex aircraft endorsement, which is the big thing for the Saratoga (albeit for reasons not relevant here: retractable landing gear). The problem was that the man had no Instrument Flight Rules certificate, very little instrument flight experience, and flew in extremely marginal conditions over an area with very poor visual reference, taking off at the very end of civil twilight, with little moonlight, while flying east.
This was arguably legal, and remains so today, but in the same sense that throwing a football while skiing was. Doing so with multiple passengers was unforgivable, especially for a route that could have been covered by car in about five hours, plus or minus the ferry. From contemporaneous AOPA coverage of the incident:
This wasn't the 1970s, where spatial disorientation training was solely the providence and concern of fighter pilots, nor was it some unpredictable black swan event. Those do exist, in general aviation; losing a vacuum pump in marginal VMC is Not Fun, and it's literally run with a drive coupling that looks like a McDonald's toy and is a single point of failure. I don't like to speak ill of the dead, and I think 'stupidity' is missing a bit of the more serious failure mode, but it's a very frustrating incident.
I will caveat that on the other side nickel meme re: political assassinations.
It's also kinda hilarious given the overlap in behavior, from modern eyes. We consider massive infidelity today on the same spectrum as LBJ flopping Little Johnson out to prove a point (and LBJ had so many affairs that his wife focused more on where they were serious), but contemporaneously?
I could write just-so stories about how pre-antibiotics and pre- (or given the Catholics, non-) contraceptive spheres made sex a lot less attractive for the women these men were married to, regardless of 'normal' sex drive. Or that the aftermath of WWII's impact on gender relations busted things so broadly that an underclass of unattached women (but a lot of these affairs were with married women! sometimes, as with Monroe, married to other Kennedys!). Or that mistresses (and misters?) and such were long-standing cultural expectations for a long period in certain classes and that the real offense were the emotional stuff -- you do still get a decent amount of this in certain spheres, or cfe the early airforce not-quite-polyamory swinging.
((Maybe we're just getting representation bias, and the horniest motherfuckers in the last hundred years are the only ones whose sexuality gets these sort of writeups.))
But I dunno that any of them are 'real' answers. The tempting bit is to look at Caro instead, not just in finding the contrast from infidelity and honestly different than you or I, but that what he consider 'essential devotion' isn't what you or I would. The contrast isn't LBJ; it's Moses.
I wonder where they found or find the balls. Money can cover a lot of problems, as can power; affairs that are to mistresses what escorts are to prostitution doesn't completely remove the time complexity, but it drops it down to an 0(3-5).
But much of this was pre-Viagra (approved 1998). No matter how willing the spirit might get, or how much abstention from jorking it might back things up, there's a certain point where the flesh is weak and spongy. Instead:
I get that I've got a weird drive, but on the other extreme I know guys who literally optimize their lives and lifestyles for convention orgies, (often don't have to worry as much about refractory periods for it), and have far greater access to willing holes and/or poles willing to meet up for sex and nothing else. Not my thing, but I can definitely understand the Braeburned interest. And they (cw: extremely gay) aren't as heavily sexed as these guys. Like, what the literal fuck.
RE: JFK Jr.
Your writeup is more accurate, I simplified what was an extensive discussion in the book because my comment was already far too long.
But I think you also have to look at getting into that plane in terms of a broader pattern of behaviors. He came close to death on cockamamie adventures like that several times before. He was still recovering from broken bones sustained when he had crashed another aircraft, he was still using crutches immediately before the flight. He had a history of doing things like kayaking into the open ocean and being blown miles from his intended route. His wife begged him not to fly, saying it was too risky, and he insisted. It's within that context that making a reckless decision to fly a plane in bad conditions goes from iffy to pretty stupid and symptomatic of his himbo lifestyle to that point.
RE: RFK Jr. Sex Diary Entries
RFK Jr. listed each woman with a scale of 1-10 with "10" being "full intercourse." Given that ten steps is a lot of intermediate levels to get to before intercourse, "1" must have been a relatively mild transaction, perhaps a kiss or even a flirtation. So all the women he listed interactions with each day weren't necessarily women he had sex with at that time. Perhaps my wife will finally succeed in locating a scan of the diary, and then we can do a better investigation without the NYP in the middle!
RE: Physical Stamina
The Coolidge Effect probably does a lot of work to get you to stand at attention when you're constantly rotating through many partners. That and the expectations he was playing to were very different: fuck a refractory period, Jack got one into the secretary and rolled off and went back to work. The idea of going many times with the same woman each night was for freaks or the French. I find the contrasts of what we call normal and what they call normal fascinating.
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