This confusion steered Kennedy down a horrifying spiral to his death on that hot and hazy night in July. If you ve ever felt the searing pain of belly-flopping off a diving board, you might rightly suspect that hitting the water at high speed is an impact not much different from colliding with a granite cliff. The kind of bafflement and panic that killed Kennedy arises in a mind as it struggles with the contradictory signals of its inner ear and its rational faculty. Reason and emotion are at war. The inner ear evolved over millennia to measure one s movement in relation to the fixed sensation of gravity.
Gravity always acts as a vector pointing straight down to the center of the earth.
The inner ear is equipped with tubes of liquid that shift in response to any movement while the mind compares these signals against this fixed sensation of gravity. This balancing apparatus signals the pilot s mind and says, You are strapped into a seat that is now as level as if you were sitting squarely at your kitchen table. The airplane s flight path creates forces that befuddle one s awareness of earth s gravity. To judge by the sensations in the seat of your pants, you literally can t tell up from down, left from right. You are as helpless to move out of the airplane s acceleration field as you would be if you were pinned to the side of a spinning circus centrifuge when the floor drops away.