JFK Jr. pushed safety limits, pilots say

The decision to fly to Martha's Vineyard on a hazy night, though common, is questioned.

By Compiled from Times wires

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 19, 1999

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Just after dusk Friday, John F. Kennedy Jr., hobbled by a broken foot, limped to the flight line of a small airport near Caldwell, N.J., to inspect his Piper Saratoga II HP.

Satisfied with the plane's condition, Kennedy eased himself into the left pilot's seat and prepared for the routine 125-mile flight to an airport near his late mother's homestead on Martha's Vineyard. His wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her older sister, Lauren Bessette, climbed aboard the six-seat plane.

Within minutes, the powerful single-engine plane roared down Runway 22 and climbed into the hazy evening sky.

No one has seen it since.

Although his trip to Massachusetts was routine, the series of decisions Kennedy made that night -- flying a complex aircraft without a flight plan, choosing not to have his flight instructor accompany him in marginal weather conditions, and piloting an airplane with a foot injury -- have grown in significance against the backdrop of a massive search operation under way just off Aquinnah, Mass.

Several pilots familiar with the route said Kennedy pushed the bounds of safety when he chose to fly to the small island after dark in hazy conditions. They added that it is a fairly common practice among the ranks of weekend pilots who flee New York City for beaches or islands every summer Friday.

The stakes rise whenever a pilot chooses to fly after dark, said Bruce Landsberg, the executive director of the American Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association Air Safety Foundation, a group that promotes the training of private pilots and publishes safety data.

In general, Landsberg said, one fatal accident occurs in small private planes for every 100,000 hours they fly. For flights after dark, the rate of fatal accidents more than doubles, to 2.4 per 100,000 hours of flying, he said.

On Friday night, conditions were also made difficult by the weather, with heat and humidity at the ideal level for creating a smudge of haze that obscures the horizon, a key feature of the landscape that allows a pilot to keep a plane flying straight and level.

Without a horizon, a pilot must rely on cockpit instruments that use a gyroscope to display an "artificial horizon," which allows a plane to be flown in rain or clouds.

Leaving land and venturing over water amplifies the problem, said Aron Wolf, a flight instructor in Los Angeles with 25 years of teaching experience who used to train pilots in Warwick, R.I., often flying to Martha's Vineyard.

"If you're far enough out, flying over water at night -- haze or no haze -- is like flying in the middle of a black void," Wolf said.

Kennedy obtained his pilot's license last year after extensive instruction, including several months spent at the Flight Safety Center in Vero Beach, considered one of the country's top training grounds for the use of single-engine planes.

Kennedy accumulated hours at the controls of both his first plane, a lightweight Cessna 182, and his Piper Saratoga, a more powerful single-engine craft that he bought in April.

But he had not yet become licensed to fly using only cockpit instruments, a skill level required for flying in bad weather or low visibility, and so was legally limited to flying in conditions where he could see the world around him.

Several veteran pilots who live on Cape Cod and often fly into and out of Martha's Vineyard lamented that Kennedy had tried to fly in Friday night's conditions.

"It's risky, and it's not good judgment to fly at night into Martha's Vineyard in haze," said Frank Joy, 77, of Orleans, Mass., who has been flying since 1942 when he piloted torpedo bombers in the Navy in World War II. For years, Joy flew construction crews from Hyannis to Martha's Vineyard to work for the day.

Several pilots said the haze over the Cape at 9:40 p.m. Friday when Kennedy was approaching Martha's Vineyard was thick with summer humidity, almost like a black fog.

Dr. Bob Arnot, chief medical correspondent for NBC, passed about 3 miles south of the Vineyard just after 9 p.m. He had to rely on instruments to land at the nearby island of Nantucket, where he vacations.

"It was just black," Arnot said. "You couldn't see Martha's Vineyard."

As Kennedy flew through gathering darkness, only a few stars emerged through the haze, and a slim crescent moon glowed in the night sky.

Radar stations along the southern New England coast tracked the plane. But because Kennedy chose not to file an official flight plan, and had no contact with air-traffic controllers, no one knew his precise route -- or that he was piloting the airplane.

Given the conditions, many private pilots on a similar route tend to take the precaution of contacting air-traffic controllers and requesting what is called an "over-water watch" or "flight following," in which the radar transponder on the plane is assigned a code and the flight is tracked more closely than other non-commercial flights, according to several pilots. Kennedy did not make such a request on Friday, with no radio contact detected from his plane for the duration of the flight, according to federal aviation officials.

For most of Kennedy's flight, everything went smoothly.

At 9:39, nearly an hour after it had taken off from New Jersey, Kennedy's plane was about 10 minutes away from the Martha's Vineyard airport when it began a sudden and steady descent. Over the next 29 seconds, the plane dropped 700 feet.

It then disappeared from all radar screens.

Investigators said Sunday that the air controllers at the Martha's Vineyard airport did not realize that Kennedy's plane was overdue until sometime Saturday morning.

The air-traffic controller at Martha's Vineyard airport was scheduled to leave at 10 p.m. Friday, and the airport's runway lights were dimmed. To brighten them, an approaching pilot must tune his or her radio to the tower frequency and click the microphone five times in five seconds, or seven times in seven seconds to reach their maximum wattage.

Until the plane's sudden drop, the radar tapes from the FAA facility used to guide planes in and out of T.F. Green Airport airspace in Rhode Island indicate a normal flight.

"We had a plot on him, we were able to determine which plane was his and he was flying at 5,600 feet," said Howard Barte, the controller's union local president in Rhode Island.

"He came within 17 miles west of Martha's Vineyard, and then in the last few minutes he seemed to descend rather steeply for that airplane. The last hit was at 1,800 feet and then we lost contact.

"It was just over the last couple of minutes of the flight that this happened," Barte said. "Maybe in five more minutes he would have contacted the Martha's Vineyard tower and begun his descent, but this rate of descent was not normal.

"When you see something like this, you have to ask: Was there something wrong with the plane, or with the pilot? Because that is all there is."

-- Information from the Boston Globe, New York Times and Associated Press was used in this report.

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