There is nothing so far to suggest that the fate of the light aircraft in which John F. Kennedy jnr and his family lost their lives had anything to do with weather. Indeed apart from suggestions that visibility may have been rather less than ideal, conditions appear to have been very good. Such incidents, however, concentrate the mind, and it is a fact that in the case of many aviation accidents weather is an important causal factor.
A study carried out some years ago analysed the causes of all "notifiable" aircraft accidents in UK air space from 1967 to 1986. There were more than 3,000 of them in the period, the overwhelming majority involving small, often single-engined aircraft.
The interesting, some would say alarming, fact emerged that the proportion of accidents in which weather played a pivotal role had increased from 2.5 per cent in 1967 to 16.3 per cent in 1976 to 22.4 per cent in 1986.
The figures, obviously, raise a question to which no one really has a ready answer: why? Some, but only some, of the increase can be explained by changes in taxonomy with passing years. A more important cause, paradoxically, is felt to be the increasingly sophisticated equipment that makes aircraft largely independent of the weather, thereby sometimes inducing a sense of overconfidence in pilots.
And of course, as aircraft become more reliable and less prone to other types of accident, the number of those involving weather may increase disproportionately.
There is also an interesting seasonality in the analysed statistics. Thirty per cent of weather-related accidents occur in spring, 25 per cent each in summer and in winter, but only 20 per cent in the three months of the autumn. Who can explain that? - except to suggest that springtime weather can be volatile, and perhaps the renaissance of the year instils a heightened appetite for derring-do.
And the kind of weather that causes accidents is interesting, too. Ice on the airframe is not nowadays the hazard it was once, because most modern aircraft have effective anti-icing equipment. Neither do thunderstorms, down-draughts or micro-bursts and their associated turbulence figure very highly in the statistics, as they do in the United States.
The vast majority of fatal weather-related aircraft accidents in these islands can be traced to the pilot becoming disorientated in fog, low cloud or rain or snow. In many cases, it turns out that the aircraft is not really where the pilot thinks it ought to be, and all too easily it can end up in collision with a hill or mountain shrouded in low cloud or fog.