At around 8:30 p.m., Carolyn arrived at the Essex Airport. Moments later, she, John, and Lauren climbed into the Saratoga and strapped themselves into the comfortable leather seats. At 8:38 p.m., twelve minutes after sunset, the airport tower cleared John and the Saratoga for departure, and they were off.
John had told Blow that he would be flying with his flight instructor, and not to worry. But in the end, primarily because of how late the hour had gotten, John told the flight instructor he would go it alone. Ed Hill recalled: “That night, there was a flight instructor. He said to John, ‘You’re taking off late. There’s cloud cover over the Vineyard. Like most Americans, I’m willing to inconvenience myself out of my love for you. I will fly up there with you and bring the plane back or get my ass back to New Jersey somehow. Don’t go without me.’” But John told the instructor to go home and be with his family. He would fly alone. “He did [go alone],” Hill said. “It was magnificently stupid that he did.”
According to a subsequent report by the National Transportation Safety Board, John told the flight instructor that he “wanted to do it alone.” Two weeks earlier, the same flight instructor had flown with John up to Martha’s Vineyard for the Fourth of July holiday weekend. That flight, too, was at night, and the instructor later reported to the NTSB that an instrument landing was required, although John was not certified for instrument use. On July 1, John had a “non-plaster cast on his leg,” according to the NTSB, and had proven competent using the autopilot in flight. But on the taxiing for takeoff and for the landing, the flight instructor was in control of the Piper Saratoga. He told the NTSB after the July 1 flight that he thought John “had the ability” to fly the plane “without a visible horizon” but “may have had difficulty performing additional tasks under such conditions.” He also said that John was “not ready for an instrument evaluation” as of July 1, 1999, and “needed additional training.” He said he was “not aware” of John “conducting any flight” in the Piper Saratoga “without an instructor on board.” He had told the NTSB that he “would not have felt comfortable” with John “conducting night flight operations on a route similar to the one flown on, and in weather conditions similar to those that existed on, the night” of July 16, 1999.
John flew the Piper Saratoga with three different flight instructors. One of them had taken “six or seven” flights with John to Martha’s Vineyard in the previous year or so. Most of the flights were conducted at night and, he told the NTSB, John “did not have any trouble flying the airplane” and “was methodical about his flight planning and that he was very cautious about his aviation decision-making.” He said John “had the capability to conduct a night flight to [Martha’s Vineyard] as long as a visible horizon existed. Still, John was not a particularly experienced pilot, especially when it came to flying at night when visual flying conditions were impaired.” In the fifteen months before July 16, John flew to or from Martha’s Vineyard about thirty-five times, seventeen of which were John flying without an instructor along and five of which were at night. By July 16, John had completed about half of a formal instrument-training course. John told other pilots at Essex that the instrument training was “very confusing” to him and “tough sledding.”
The night was hazy, hot, and humid. And it was difficult to see the horizon as the haze accumulated and the light faded. John had not filed a flight plan with the FAA, nor was he required to do so. He also had not engaged a private tracking service to monitor his flight—nor was that a requirement, either. At least one other pilot at the Essex Airport that night had decided not to fly because of the hazy conditions. Kyle Bailey told Time that he canceled his planned flight because of “a troubling haze that had already reduced visibility” and that when he “looked off in the distance” he could not see a familiar mountain ridge. “That is a test that most pilots use at the airport,” he said.
The idea was for John and Carolyn to drop Lauren off at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport and then to fly on to the Barnstable Municipal Airport, in Hyannis, just across Vineyard Sound from Cape Cod. At 8:34 p.m., John contacted the tower: “Saratoga niner two five three november ready to taxi with mike … right turnout northeast bound.” The flight controller instructed him to go to runway twenty-two, which John acknowledged. Four minutes later, John informed the tower he was ready for takeoff. He was then cleared. The controller asked John if he was heading north toward Teterboro Airport. “No sir, I’m uh actually I’m heading a little uh north of it, uh eastbound,” John replied. He was then instructed to “make it a right downwind departure then.” John confirmed the instructions: “right downwind departure two two.” There were no further conversations between John and air traffic controllers.
John flew the Piper northeast across the Hudson River, at an altitude of around fourteen hundred feet. Then he started climbing. He reached an altitude of fifty-five hundred feet about six miles northeast of the Westchester County Airport. He then presumably put the plane on autopilot: it remained at an altitude of fifty-five hundred feet; passed Bridgeport and New Haven, Connecticut; and then, flying parallel to the Connecticut and Rhode Island coastlines, passed Port Judith, Rhode Island, and flew across the Rhode Island Sound. At about thirty-four miles west of the Martha’s Vineyard Airport, John began to descend at a rate of between four hundred and eight hundred feet per minute, at an airspeed of 160 knots.
At around 9:38 p.m., John turned the plane to the right, heading in a southerly direction. Thirty seconds later, John leveled the plane out at an altitude of twenty-two hundred feet and began a climb that lasted another thirty seconds. At 9:39 p.m., the plane leveled off at twenty-five hundred feet and headed in a southeasterly direction. About a minute later, John climbed the plane to twenty-six hundred feet and made a left turn and then began descending at a rate of nine hundred feet per minute. “It’s unclear why the plane was descending so quickly,” Jeff Kluger and Mark Thompson wrote in Time a few days later, “but Kennedy may have been trying to drop below the haze. For nearly five minutes, the plane’s descent continued at this relatively steep rate, losing about two-thirds of its altitude until it was just 2,300 ft. above the Atlantic wavetops. Martha’s Vineyard was by now only 20 miles away, but if the Piper kept dropping at this rate, it would hit ocean well before it reached the landing strip. For a pilot flying in better conditions—even an inexperienced pilot—the next step would be obvious: look out your window, get your bearings and level out your plane. J.F.K. Jr. didn’t have that option. No matter how low he flew, there was still haze. Kennedy, who had earned his pilot’s license only 15 months ago, now found himself flying a plane that might as well have had no windows at all. The first rule pilots are taught in a vertiginous situation like this is to ignore the signals your body is trying to send. The inner ear is equipped with an exquisitely well-tuned balance mechanism, but it’s a mechanism that’s meant to operate with the help of other cues, particularly visual ones. Without that, the balance system spins like an unmoored gyroscope.”
Then John, increasingly disoriented and “apparently flummoxed,” according to Time, turned right; the speed of the plane increased and it was descending rapidly, at a rate of forty-seven hundred feet per minute. “Perhaps he was still searching for a break in the haze, or perhaps merely stumbling about,” Kluger and Thompson continued. “If he followed his flight training—and his reputation as a generally cautious pilot suggests he would have—he would now have performed what’s known as ‘the scan,’ a quick survey of half-a-dozen key instruments that would reveal his plane’s altitude, attitude and direction. But his brief experience with instrument piloting—he was certified to fly only under eyeball conditions—left him ill-equipped to handle a confusing situation. As the dials on the panel and the signals in his brain told him two different things, his eyes probably bounced back and forth between the instruments and the windows in a frantic attempt to reconcile the two. ‘He was like a blind man trying to find his way out of a room,’ a Piper Saratoga pilot surmises. And lik
e a blind man, he now completely lost his way.”
According to the NTSB, the last recorded radar position for John’s Piper Saratoga occurred at 9:40 p.m., at an altitude of eleven hundred feet. The Piper’s airspeed, vertical acceleration, bank, and dive angle continued to increase, and the right turn tightened until the plane hit the water, at about 9:41 p.m. “Trying to guess the atmosphere in the cockpit during the last 15 sec[onds] or so before the plane hit the sea will always be speculation—and grim speculation at that,” Time concluded. “It was probably terrifying as the trajectory steepened. It was almost certainly quick—mercifully quick—when the last bit of sky ran out and the water met the plane like an asphalt runway. Death, at that speed, is instantaneous, and well before the wreckage of the Saratoga could descend the 116 ft. to the bottom of the darkened Atlantic, its three occupants were gone.” In its report, the NTSB claimed that the “probable cause” of the accident was John’s “failure to maintain control” of the Piper “during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation. Factors in the accident were haze, and the dark night.”
* * *
AT AROUND TEN O’CLOCK that Friday night, the couple who had been waiting at the small Martha’s Vineyard Airport to meet Lauren Bessette had grown restless, wondering where she was, and asked Adam Budd, a twenty-one-year-old intern at the airport, for help in locating her. Five minutes later, Budd called the FAA, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and asked whether John’s plane could be tracked. Budd was told that this was not the kind of information that could be shared over the phone. A few minutes later, John’s uncle Ted called John’s apartment on North Moore Street. Senator Kennedy had learned that John’s plane was overdue and was hoping that perhaps John had decided to stay in New York City for the night. RoseMarie Terenzio answered the senator’s call. The air-conditioning in her apartment wasn’t working, and John had agreed to let her stay in his place for the weekend. Terenzio had similar conversations for the next few hours, including one with Carole Radziwill, the wife of John’s first cousin Anthony.
At 2 a.m., the family alerted the Coast Guard about the Piper’s disappearance, kicking off a full-scale search-and-rescue mission in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard. Soon enough, CNN was broadcasting that John’s plane was missing and showed the military helicopters circling the water, looking for any sign of a missing aircraft. John’s disappearance was news all around the world. I remember returning from a run near my farmhouse in upstate New York that Saturday morning when my wife shared the news with me. I sat glued for hours to the CNN broadcast.
For the next four days, the Coast Guard, the navy, and the Massachusetts State Police together searched for the plane’s wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Around noon on July 20, a group of state police divers, in an envoy of three small boats, headed out of Menemsha Harbor, on Martha’s Vineyard, as part of this search. Three hours later, they returned empty-handed. It was looking increasingly grim. “We are filled with unspeakable grief and sadness by the loss of John and Carolyn and Lauren Bessette,” Senator Kennedy said on behalf of his family. “John was a shining light in all our lives and in the lives of the nation and the world that first came to know him as a little boy.”
John’s closest friends were in shock. “I spent a couple of hours trying to convince myself that what they’d done was to run away,” John Perry Barlow said. “So I thought, Gosh, maybe they’ve pulled this off. Maybe they’ll go off and get plastic surgery and disappear from the face of the earth, and.… But that was a pretty optimistic view.” Sasha Chermayeff shared Barlow’s fantasy. “I held out hope for a while that he would be stranded somewhere, like swimming there, or whatever,” she said. RoseMarie Terenzio refused to believe what had happened. “Not in a million years did I think there was any way possible that plane had gone down,” she said. “I just thought, ‘He’s somewhere else.’ You know, to be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever grasp what happened.” When Gary Ginsberg heard from a friend that John’s plane had gone missing, he called RoseMarie, who he knew was staying at John’s apartment. “Rose, this is not true,” he said to her. “And she broke down and said, ‘Yeah, it’s true. They can’t find the plane.’ And that’s how I found out.”
* * *
LATER THAT NIGHT, AROUND TEN FORTY, US Navy divers from the recovery ship USS Grasp found the plane in about 120 feet of water, some one-quarter mile north of John’s last-known radar position. There was a debris field on the bottom of the ocean. The main cabin of the plane was found in the middle of the debris field. The plane’s wreckage was brought up from the ocean floor, placed on the Grasp, and transferred to Newport, Rhode Island. It was then transferred again, to Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, where John had once pleaded, in vain, to join his father on a trip aboard Air Force One.
* * *
ON JULY 21, DR. JAMES WEINER, in the office of the chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, examined the bodies of John, Carolyn, and Lauren found inside the wreckage and determined they had died as a result of “multiple injuries” caused by an “airplane accident.”
On July 22, in keeping with John’s request, John, Carolyn, and Lauren’s bodies were cremated and their ashes were strewn into the Atlantic Ocean from the fantail of the USS Briscoe, a navy destroyer that had been anchored between Martha’s Vineyard and Hyannis Port. “We commit their elements to the deep, for we are dust and unto dust we shall return,” a navy chaplain prayed. Only seventeen family members attended the ceremony aboard the Briscoe, but millions more were glued to their television screens. NBC’s coverage featured the eerie observation by John’s father, from September 14, 1962—during a toast to the America’s Cup sailing team—that “it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins, the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.”
* * *
ED HILL REMEMBERED BEING in bed at 6 a.m. on Saturday in Portland, Oregon, when his phone rang. It was 9 a.m. on the East Coast, and his father had been battling cancer. He thought the phone call was likely to be about how his father had taken a turn for the worse. It was his sister.
“Ed, it’s Meg,” she said.
“Yeah. What’s up?” he replied.
“Um, well I have some bad news,” she said.
“Well, I figured this phone call was bad news,” he said.
“No, it’s not Dad,” she said. “The thing is, John Kennedy’s plane is missing.”
He thanked her and said he had to go. “I hung up the phone and all the air went out of my life,” he said. “I walk[ed] back across the room, back to the bedroom. I got in bed and I lay down with my back to my girlfriend. She said, ‘Who was that?’ I said, ‘That was my sister.’ She said, ‘Oh my God. Is it your dad?’ I said, ‘No. John’s plane is missing.’ God bless her, she didn’t say a fucking word.… All I could think of was, You fucking idiot. I knew there was going to be a bad reason why that plane was gone, and there was. It was like, Couldn’t you just fucking listen to me just fucking once? Dumb-ass motherfucker, fucking did that to the whole fucking country. I just wish that he hadn’t had so many enablers. I think he had reached the point where I don’t think he needed enablers anymore.… He died in a way that was sadly predictable. I was furious.”
After John’s death, Terenzio called Hill and insisted that he come to John’s apartment on North Moore Street to help her. By then, hundreds of people had been gathering on the street in front of the apartment building and had placed all sorts of memorials of John—candles, cards, flowers—on the stoop leading into the building. (I visited the shrine, too.) “I flew into New York and went to his apartment,” Hill recalled. “There was a Macintosh computer sitting there as he left it, open to flight simulation software. Oh, nice effort, John, but it’s a little more c
omplicated than that. A glancing relationship with some software when you’ve got fucking three hours of documented instrument time is not going to save your life; in fact it might end it, and it did. It was stupid.”
The memory got Hill thinking. “So why was he so fucking stupid?” he wondered. “Did he want to die? Did he want to climb out of his skin because he wanted death? Did he want to climb out of his skin because it felt like it was crawling with vermin? Did he want to climb out of his skin because he couldn’t live in that skin with his dead father? I don’t know, but he couldn’t stop himself from being reckless. As he got older and he’s meeting these fucking investment bankers or these corporate lawyers or whomever, you know, guys who would cut their fucking balls off to be able to hang out with him just so they can impress their girlfriends—‘I rode a snowmobile across the North Pole with John Kennedy,’ or whatever. Those guys are legion. ‘I rode a mountain bike across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean with John Kennedy’—he would have no trouble finding anyone to go along with any goddamn reckless amusement that he could conceive. Fortunately, those of us who were close to him, having pushed the envelope enough, had reached the point where we were like, ‘No, fuck this shit.’ The last time I was in a plane with him, we take off from Barnstable, which is the Hyannis airport. We fly to Logan. We get in this fucking airplane. Not only are we flying ahead of a serious storm—you could see it, it was right behind us—but the radio was fucked up. I don’t know how the hell he got back home. I don’t think he flew back. I think he had to leave the plane there or something. I don’t remember the whole story, but it was reckless. I mean general aviation in general is reckless. I’ve been in the air with three friends, Jerry Gerber—that’s Gerber knives—John Kennedy, and Tiger Warren, Geraldine Pope’s first husband, who crashed his plane into the Columbia River, killing himself and his three sons. But anyway, I’ve sat next to three friends of mine in their putt-putts, and two of those friends died in those putt-putts. Jerry Gerber is still around. It’s stupid. General aviation is a fucking—they call them ‘doctor killers’ for a reason, but if you want to be totally reasonable you should call them ‘stupid doctor killers.’ Yes, John, airports are a drag if you’re John Kennedy, but this has nothing to do with privacy, bro. This has to do with notching your belt—‘I’m a pilot, too.’ Fuck that.”
Four Friends Page 38
