There was no other way for FX’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette to end.

On July 16, 1999, 38-year-old JFK Jr., his 33-year-old wife Carolyn, and Carolyn’s 34-year-old sister Lauren died in a plane crash roughly seven miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

The political scion was piloting his Piper Saratoga aircraft that evening. The plan was to fly from Essex Airport in Caldwell, N.J., to Martha’s Vineyard. There, he’d drop off Lauren, who had plans to meet up with friends, and continue on with Carolyn to Hyannis Point, Mass., for the wedding of his cousin, Rory Kennedy.

In the quarter of a century since, numerous specifics have emerged about the crash and how it could have been avoided. Below are some of most chilling details we compiled from biographies, news briefs, and the National Transportation Safety Board’s official report on the incident from March 2000.

JFK Jr. had crashed a parasail the month before

As detailed in the NTSB report, JFK Jr. fractured his left ankle in a parasailing accident roughly a month and a half before the crash.

“He crashed the stupid Ultra Light into a bush on Memorial Day weekend. It was super dumb,” recalled Robbie Littell, a friend of JFK Jr.’s, in RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil’s book JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography.

He was treated the following day and placed into a cast. In late June, he swapped the cast for a Cam-Walker boot. The boot came off on July 15, the day before the crash, and JFK Jr. was given a “straight cane and instructed in cane usage,” per the NTSB report.

Gary Ginsberg, a friend and colleague, recalls in An Intimate Oral Biography how excited JFK Jr. was to get the cast off, specifically as it pertained to flying. “He said, ‘If I get my cast off, I can fly — I don’t have to fly with an instructor.”

The thought of him flying solo so soon after his injury was a cause of concern for several people in his orbit, including Richard Blow, who worked with JFK Jr. at George magazine.

Blow recalled the last time he saw JFK Jr. in his 2002 book American Son, saying that after JFK Jr. told him he was planning to fly to Hyannis Port, the author “glanced down at John’s foot — even the short distance back from the restaurant had tired him — then gave him a skeptical look.”

“Don’t worry. I’m flying with an instructor,” JFK Jr. is said to have replied.

But Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation expert who investigated the crash for the NTSB report, is confident the injury “played no role” in the crash. “We had a medical doctor on staff at the NTSB and he looked at that thoroughly,” he said in An Intimate Oral Biography. “The evidence suggests he had full range of his foot to be able to what he needed to do for that flight.”

JFK Jr. refused a flight instructor’s help the day of the crash

Despite what he told Blow, JFK Jr. did not fly with an instructor on the night of the crash. The NTSB report notes that an instructor was willing to join him, but JFK Jr. rebuffed the offer, saying he “wanted to do it alone.”

This proved to be a fatal mistake due to his inexperience and the fact that the Piper Saratoga he was piloting was much more complex than the Cessna 182 Skylane in which he had done most of his training.

“It’s like going between, say, a Lexus and a Formula One car, a lot more instruments, and he had not enough hours in that plane,” explained friend Gustavo Paredes in An Intimate Oral Biography.

JFK Jr. was not fully trained in how to read those instruments, as he was still in the process of earning his airplane instrument rating. “He was not trained for instrument flying. He was trained to look outside to get his visual cues,” said Guzzetti.

He was also still getting the hang of flying the Saratoga. According to the NTSB report, he had less than an hour of experience flying it at night without an instructor on board.

“As far as I knew, John didn’t fly out without a copilot on the [Saratoga],” said his childhood friend Sasha Chermayeff in An Intimate Oral Biography.

JFK Jr.’s decision was perhaps due to his desire to push himself. “He was a guy who loved to challenge himself physically, mentally, professionally, personally, and thrill-seeking was kind of part of all that,” recalled Ginsberg.

If they had left earlier, they might still be alive

Several friends and colleagues in An Intimate Oral Biography recalled how JFK Jr., Carolyn, and Lauren were running late on the day of the crash. They initially intended to depart during the day, but didn’t take off until nearly 9 p.m. ET.

“Everybody was running late,” Paredes recalled. “And then there was horrible traffic and it took them two hours to get to Essex. So by the time they took off, the weather had shifted. And John didn’t get an update.”

Barry Stott, a pilot based out of Martha’s Vineyard, told the biographers that “a complete haze developed” on the night of the crash. “It was sort of like fog all the way up to eleven thousand feet. The visibility was very, very poor.”

As Guzzetti put it, “It was a dark night, the moon wasn’t well lit, there was a haze. A couple of other pilots who flew that night reported to the NTSB that they decided not to make the flight because of those conditions. He was likely in over his head.”

JFK Jr. likely experienced spatial disorientation in the air

The official NTSB report cited “spatial disorientation” as a likely cause of the crash. Broadly, spatial disorientation refers to a mistaken perception of one’s position and motion relative to the ground. It can be caused by what the report refers to as “hazardous illusions that are peculiar to flight,” and to surface at night and in adverse weather.

In An Intimate Oral Biography, Guzzetti explains that you can see the disorientation in JFK Jr.’s flight path that night. “The last 30 miles, he starts to wander as he begins his descent to Martha’s Vineyard. His flight path into the water is indicative of something called spatial disorientation. His inner ears were playing tricks with his sense of orientation.”

Guzzetti continued, “Your inner ear says you’re turning to the left and you’re actually not. So you correct to the right, thinking that you’re leveling the airplane. His flight path into the water is consistent with what is known as a graveyard spiral. The airplane makes a spiral nose-down, down, down to the grave, kind of like going down a drain.”

This disorientation would have likely caused confusion for JFK Jr. As Guzzetti put it, “You see your airspeed go up and you don’t quite know where you’re at. I would expect that the pilot would be very confused and perhaps a little frightened because the instruments may have not been matching up with how he was feeling.”

Nobody is sure why the autopilot wasn’t engaged

In An Intimate Oral Biography, both Guzzetti and Munir Hussain, the latter of whom sold the Saratoga to JFK Jr., are unsure why the autopilot was turned off at the time of the crash. An investigation following the incident showed that there wasn’t a malfunction.

“I believe he was on autopilot as he flew along the coast because the altitude remained incredibly consistent and so did the heading,” said Guzzetti. “But when he turned out towards Martha’s Vineyard, my view was that the autopilot was not engaged. He may have accidentally disconnected it, or purposefully disconnected it so that he could ‘hand fly’ the plane on its approach to Martha’s Vineyard. We just don’t know, because small airplanes like this do not have black boxes.”

Hussain added, “If he had kept it going, he could have taken the plane down to 200, 300 feet, until he saw the runway, and then disconnected the autopilot and landed. He must have disconnected earlier, then very quickly lost control of the plane. Nobody knows why the autopilot was not engaged.”

Carolyn and Lauren may not have even known the plane was crashing

According to Guzzetti, only 17 seconds passed “from the time they began to divert from their flight path to the time they impacted the ocean.”

Carolyn and Lauren, he said, may not have even known a crash was imminent. “They might’ve felt a little g-force pushing them down in their seats. You would’ve heard the rush of air over the fuselage accelerate or get louder, during the final fatal plunge. Perhaps feel yourself accelerating a little bit… And then they hit the surface of the water and it’s over. Boom.”

As reported by the Washington Post, autopsies determined that all three passengers died on impact.

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