as he makes the flight preparations, including a check of the National Weather Service’s aviation forecast. Since he will be flying under visual flight rules, he is not required to file a flight plan.
According to the New York Post, “Not only was Kennedy suffering emotional ups and downs that day, he was still taking Vicodin to relieve the pain of a recently broken ankle, plus Ritalin for attention-deficit disorder and medication for a thyroid problem.” The thyroid problem is known as Graves’ disease (similar to the Addison’s disease his father suffered).
Carolyn is the last to arrive, having done some last-minute shopping for the perfect dress to wear to the wedding. She calls her friend Carole Radziwill from the plane, a little after 8:00 p.m. “I remember at the end she said, ‘I love you.’…For some reason, I didn’t say I love you back, and that always stuck with me. And she said, ‘I’ll call you when I land.’ And that was the last I ever heard from her.”
* * *
As dusk falls and the weather reports take a turn, an experienced pilot named Kyle Bailey cancels his own planned flight to Martha’s Vineyard. Another pilot, Roy Stoppard, who has just flown down from the Cape, tells John Jr. that he “ran into a thick haze on the way down” and that John “might want to wait a while.”
“No chance,” John answers. “I’m already late,” exhibiting an attitude that experienced aviators like Bailey and Stoppard call “get there-itus.”
A flight instructor offers to join the flight as copilot, but John says “he want[s] to do it alone” even though a spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association later explains, “Flying at night over featureless terrain or water, and particularly in haze or overcast, is a prime set-up for spatial disorientation, because you’ve lost the horizon.”
The flight takes off at 8:38 p.m., and at 8:40, John Jr. makes his sole radio transmission of the flight. “North of Teterboro. Heading eastward.”
By 8:49 p.m., there is already a problem. In his ascent, John has erroneously strayed into the airspace of an American Airlines Flight 128, descending toward Westchester Airport with 128 passengers and 6 crew on board.
Air traffic controllers are able to redirect the American Airlines flight in time to avoid a midair collision, but radio communications make it clear that John is at fault.
FLIGHT 1484: “I understand he’s not in contact with you or anybody else.”
CONTROLLER: “Uh nope doesn’t [sic] not talking to anybody.”
At a cruising altitude of 5,500 feet, John Jr. guides the Piper Saratoga through thirty minutes of smooth airtime. Then the haze that the pilots on the ground in New Jersey had warned of envelops the plane.
At just after 9:34 p.m., John is seven and a half miles from the Martha’s Vineyard airport. Private pilot Michael Bard, who had returned to Connecticut from Martha’s Vineyard about twenty minutes earlier, describes the conditions as “very hazy, and it was very dark, and it was very hard to see the horizon.” Under those conditions, Bard tells the New York Times, “if you’re not instrument rated, it could be difficult maintaining the airplane in an upright condition.”
Radar records the plane’s erratic descent from 2,200 feet at 9:40, dropping several hundred feet every few seconds, the altimeter spinning toward zero as the Piper goes into a “graveyard spiral” that may have lasted as long as thirty seconds.
At 9:41 p.m., the plane disappears from radar.
* * *
At midnight, Carole Radziwill is startled awake by her ringing telephone. “Are they there with you?” a friend of John’s is asking. “I’m at the [Martha’s Vineyard] airport and they’re not here.”
Radziwill, a former reporter for ABC News, spends hours making calls. Around 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., she calls the Coast Guard. “I said, ‘My cousin’s missing.’ He took the name, and there was a little bit of a gasp on the other end of the phone.”
* * *
Rory Kennedy’s wedding is postponed as the family gathers at the Kennedy compound to await news of John, Carolyn, and Lauren.
“If Jackie was alive,” Ethel says, “I don’t know how she would handle this. In fact I don’t think she could bear it.” She adds, “I always thought of Johnny as one of my own.”
President Bill Clinton orders the deployment of USS Grasp, a navy recovery ship. Addressing complaints over preferential treatment for the Kennedys over citizen accident victims, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon says, “It’s a family that has distinguished itself through public service for more than thirty years.” By