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Flashmag! Issue 175august 2026
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The Last video Shoot
The music video seems almost surreal today. Turquoise sea. Blue sky. Aaliyah dances on a boat and then in front of the ocean. Everything in it evokes gentleness, light, and movement. On August 25, filming wrapped up earlier than planned. Part of the crew decided to return to the United States. But the arrangements for the return were chaotic. The days leading up to the flight were marked by problems with transportation, luggage, and airline changes. The filming equipment weighed a considerable amount. According to subsequent legal proceedings, the victims’ families would criticize the companies involved for poor transportation planning, an inadequate budget, the choice of charter airline, and the decision to allow a heavily overloaded plane to take off. According to several witnesses present that day— whose accounts resurfaced twenty years later in an investigative book by music journalist Kathy Iandoli— Aaliyah, upon seeing the size of the small aircraft that was to carry them, reportedly expressed clear reluctance, even a refusal, to board it. The plane, designed to carry a maximum of eight passengers including the pilot, was nevertheless supposed to accommodate nine people, as well as all the filming equipment: cameras, spotlights, suitcases, and video gear. Two taxi drivers who dropped the group off at the airport would later testify during the official investigation that they, too, were struck by the amount of luggage crammed into such a small plane. Iandoli’ s investigation puts forward a chilling hypothesis— one she herself admits she hesitated to publish because it is so difficult to verify with certainty: Aaliyah may have been put on board in a dazed state, possibly after taking a sleeping pill or an anti-anxiety medication to calm her apprehension about the flight. Kathy Iandoli published * Baby Girl: Better Known as Aaliyah *. In it, she recounts the account of Kingsley Russell, who was thirteen years old in 2001 and was helping out at his family’ s transportation business in the Bahamas. According to Russell, Aaliyah saw the small plane and refused to board it.