Payne Stewart, the flamboyant, loud and larrakinish golfer who won the 1998 US golf open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco was as famous for his outlandish choice of clothes as he was for his golfing ability. The Missouri born born again christian didn't have fate on his side on the 25th October, 1998, when what was supposed to be a routine Lear Jet flight from Florida to Texas, along with four other passengers and two crew members, quickly turned into the flight of doom for him and his entourage. For reasons that even over 14 years later have never been fully explained, Payne Stewart's plane decompressed only half an hour into the flight just as the pilot was supposed to redirect the flight path from north-west to due west in the direction of Texas around northern Florida. The then US president Bill Clinton gave orders for air force jets to follow the plane as it cruised 'unmanned' right across the mid-east of the United States in case it run out of fuel and threatened to crash into any populated area. What remains enigmatic about this tragedy is that oxygen masks which every Lear Jet is fitted with in the case of a decompression emergency should have been enough to save the lives of all on board the plane, in the space of 3 seconds they are supposed to drop down and be there waiting for a passenger to put on quickly. Something unusually catastrophic occured on this Learjet 35 that defies any logical explanation in comparison to every other documented case of aircraft decompression since planes were ever invented. The doomed plane ended up crashing in a cow paddock near the tiny town of Aberdeen in South Dakota. Stewart had racked up 11 PGA tournament wins and three major titles before his bizarre death at the age of 42, to me golf has never quite been the same since he departed.
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