Agreed - Elvis had had a good bit of track to run on; God knows how much stuff he put out in addition to the unreleased material (there's a stack of bootlegs and then some on top of the official RCA work), but Buddy barely got out the starting blocks. He left some great stuff behind, but there'll always be the "what if...".
I caught a link to the US Aviation Board's accident report for the incident which made for fascinating reading. Turns out the pilot didn't do a full check on the weather conditions, wasn't trained to fly that aircraft on the then new instrumentation that'd been introduced for that plane and conseqeuently misread what it was telling him. When the weather closed in on his flight, the consensus seems to be that he pretty much flew into the ground.
I used to work for one of the big three airline engine manufacturers (clue: it's the only British one...!) and the engine reports we got back were always interesting. Up to the time I left, they'd never had a fatal accident due to one of their engines failing - pretty impressive record given the use that kit gets!
(Anyway, I digress a wee bit folks - Elvis - 4CD - superdooper boxset - deluxe thingy - £12 - Fopp - buy it and help the economy!)