Mar 7, 2015 2 min read

Commemorated by Don McLean in the song “American Pie” as the “day the music died,” the plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa, Feb. 3, 1959, that claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson, who was more widely known as “The Big Bopper,” was arguably the first great tragedy of rock ‘n’ roll.

Holly was just 22. Valens was all of 17. Richardson, the old man of the group, was 28. In a career that had only gotten under way a couple of years before, Holly already created songs we now regard as classics like “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue.” Who knows what else he would have come up with had he been given more time.

It was a tragedy, but its causes were pretty cut and dried – the three singers flew off into a dark, snowy night in a plane that was being piloted by a neophyte who was not familiar with the aircraft’s instrument panel. With no points of reference on the ground, the initial report on the crash from the Civil Aeronautics Board found the pilot became confused “and thought he was making a climbing turn when he was making a descending turn.” Pretty simple.

But that hasn’t stopped a raft of conspiracy theories from being promulgated about the accident over the decades, and now the National Transportation Safety Board is considering a request to reopen the case after a pilot in New England contacted the agency theorizing, among other things, the plane was carrying too much weight.

The board should keep this case closed. It’s hard to see what would be gained by reopening it. Any structural problems with the plane would have surely become apparent at the time of the mishap, or become manifest in some other crash shortly thereafter. And reopening the case won’t bring back the lives lost.

Above all, taxpayer dollars would be spent in an exercise that would almost certainly yield the same conclusion officials arrived at all those years ago – “the music died” as a result of simple human error.