John F Kennedy Jr’s body was found only shortly before it may have been swept away by the Atlantic, the leader of the search for his crashed aircraft has revealed.
Coast Guard Captain W Russell “Russ” Webster said crews were preparing to abandon the operation when sonar detected a signal on the ocean floor, four days after the aircraft disappeared off Martha’s Vineyard on 16 July 1999.
Kennedy, who was piloting the small plane, was killed alongside his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren. The crash prompted one of the largest maritime rescue operations mounted for private citizens in US history.
Webster said Kennedy’s remains were discovered 116ft below the surface, about seven miles from the coastline and roughly 10ft from the wreckage. The Bessette sisters were found inside the aircraft, still strapped into their seats.
“They might have never found him had another day gone by,” said Webster’s wife, historian Theresa Mitchell Webster, who has helped document the operation in a forthcoming book about the search.
Even after the wreckage and bodies had been located, it took a further day to recover the remains, the couple said. Divers used an array of technology to scan the seabed during the search.
Theresa Webster said Carolyn and Lauren Bessette had been so badly affected by the crash that they were “not facially recognizable”. They were identified by their different hair colours, she said.
The search was made more difficult because Kennedy had been flying under visual flight rules, meaning the Federal Aviation Administration was not tracking the aircraft during its final journey.
He was navigating using geographical reference points and had not completed his instrument training to become a certified pilot. A storm had moved over Martha’s Vineyard before the flight.
Webster said Kennedy’s lack of experience with flight instruments may have contributed to the crash. One of his instructors had warned him that he was “not ready” to fly, he recalled.
The plane is believed to have lost its sense of the horizon before descending into the ocean at high speed. A National Transportation Safety Board investigation found that it fell at 4,700ft per minute.
“Water is only marginally less than cement at that speed and coming from that altitude,” Webster said.
