I was the last person to see JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette alive: What was said that night is unthinkably haunting… this is the truth about their runway fight and death spiral
Kyle Bailey watched with alarm as the novice pilot readied his plane.
It was a hot, humid July evening and Bailey, a passionate flying enthusiast, had reluctantly called off his own flight to Martha’s Vineyard because the weather conditions were just too risky.
Bailey recognized the pilot and could see very well that he was in a hurry. Should he have called out in concern – to warn him?
Instead, Bailey looked on in silence. And as soon as the pilot’s glamorous wife arrived, Bailey watched as he taxied to the runway, fired up the engines and took off into the skies he loved so much.
It was July 16, 1999, and Bailey had just become the last person to see John F Kennedy Jr, his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren alive.
JFK Jr flew into the hazy night, while Bailey headed back to the New Jersey home he shared with his parents – but he couldn’t quite shake the worry that tugged at him.
Years later his mother would remind him how he had turned to her that evening and said: ‘I hope he doesn’t kill himself one day in that airplane.’
At 6am the following morning, Bailey called the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) weather line to get the automated forecast and was among the first outside the Kennedy family to learn that John’s plane had disappeared.
Bailey was the last person to see John F Kennedy Jr, his wife Carolyn Bessette (pictured together) and her sister Lauren, alive
Kennedy is pictured with his plane on September 8, 1998
Kyle Bailey is pictured next to his plane at the Essex County Airport in 1999
Bailey told his father, who worked at ABC News. Soon he was inundated with questions.
Many persist to this day. Did Bailey, at the time a 25-year-old supermarket analyst, regret not raising his anxiety about the flight with Kennedy?
The truth is, it didn’t even cross his mind, he told the Daily Mail. It would, he said, have been intrusive – patronizing even. Like going up to someone getting into their car in New York City and offering unbidden advice about traffic.
‘You’d think: “Why are you telling me this?”‘ he explained. ‘In aviation, it’s worse because you’re kind of saying they are not a good pilot, or inexperienced.’
Bailey, now an aviation consultant, also doubted what he’d seen: ‘I could have missed an instructor getting into the cockpit beside John. So, it would have been just out of place.’
Besides, Kennedy, 38, and Bessette, 33, were among the most famous people in America at the time, and Bailey and his flying friends were careful to give them space.
The flight enthusiasts who saw Kennedy at Essex County airport regularly, knew him as a relaxed, charming, friendly figure. Bessette was more reserved and distant, but far prettier, he said, than photos suggested.
She didn’t appear to enjoy her time at the airport or in the plane, said Bailey, who rarely saw her smile. Friends over the years have confirmed that Bessette did not appreciate her husband’s love of flying.
‘I always wanted to give them their privacy,’ said Bailey, who last month published a book of his experience, Witness: JFK Jr’s Fatal Flight. ‘He was there often, with his dog. She was less frequently there, but I saw her. One time she was sitting on the curb reading a book, waiting for him.’
He thought about walking over and saying, ‘Hi,’ but decided against it, reasoning that if Kennedy turned up to see him chatting with his wife he might be less than happy: ‘I said to myself, I better not. I don’t want to get myself in trouble.’
That night in July, Bailey saw Kennedy and Bessette talking as Kennedy walked around the plane performing final checks. It would later be suggested that the couple had been arguing ahead of their ill-fated flight, but Bailey does not remember it that way.
As far as he recalled the couple’s exchange was, ‘not animated.’ He said: ‘I don’t think they were having an argument.’
A little over an hour after Bailey saw him take off, Kennedy crashed into the ocean off Cape Cod. It was 9.41pm and none on board stood any chance of survival.
‘He was there often, with his dog. She was less frequently there, but I saw her. One time she was sitting on the curb reading a book, waiting for him,’ Bailey said
Kennedy (pictured in his plane) and Bessette were among the most famous people in America at the time, and Bailey and his flying friends were careful to give them space
Bailey is now an aviation consultant
Last month Bailey published a book of his experience: Witness – JFK Jr’s Fatal Flight
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) analyzed the wreckage and radars and concluded that Kennedy became disoriented in the dark, hazy night, losing his bearings and pitching the six-seater Piper Saratoga plane into a downward spin known as a ‘graveyard spiral.’
His inexperience no doubt played a part. Of the 36 hours he had flown in the Piper – bought just three months before the crash – only three had been without an instructor present and only 48 minutes of that solo flying was in darkness.
He was stressed. He and Bessette were having marital problems, and his business, a magazine called George, was struggling. And he was in a rush. He needed to get to Hyannis Port in Massachusetts ahead of the wedding of his cousin Rory, daughter of Robert F Kennedy and Ethel, which was happening the following day.
Kennedy knew that the airport control tower at Martha’s Vineyard would switch off the runway lights at 10pm, meaning any late-arriving pilots had to activate them remotely – a challenging proposition and an additional complication for an already stretched, novice pilot.
His plan was to drop Lauren at Martha’s Vineyard airport and then carry on alone with Bessette to Hyannis Port.
As he approached Martha’s Vineyard at 9:30pm, all of this surely weighed on his mind.
Bailey explained: ‘I always hug the coast especially at nighttime. At the very worst, you could put that thing right down on the sandy beach if you really had to.’
But Kennedy struck out over the ocean. According to Bailey: ‘It might have been a race against time, or he might have just put in the direct route in his GPS and he just went with that, rather than saying: “We’re approaching darkness now, if we have an engine failure or something, it would be a problem over water.”‘
Of course the weather conditions that had prompted Bailey to abandon his own plans that night played a part.
‘The haze that he encountered, or the fog, was just blanketing the ground and obscuring those lights. So, he lost the horizon,’ Bailey said. ‘In that situation, your mind is playing tricks on you.
‘The fluid that you have in your ears is kind of rolling; it’s messing with your brain and giving you bad information, similar to vertigo. It’s causing the whole world to look like it’s spinning.’
Kennedy was stressed. He and Carolyn (pictured in 1998) were having marital problems, and his business, a magazine called George, was struggling
The wreckage of JFK Jr’s plane was recovered from the water
After the tragedy, Bailey appeared on news segments around the world for weeks. (Pictured: Bailey on Fox News on July 18, 1999)
The horrifying images Bailey’s words conjure linger.
In the immediate aftermath of the crash Bailey’s own world was caught up in a whirlwind of media attention. He was on news stations around the world for two weeks straight.
At one point, he said, he was driving with the window down and heard his own voice playing out on somebody’s radio.
It was, Bailey said, ‘surreal,’ to be a witness to that moment in history. But more than anything, it was sad. He said: ‘We all felt like he was family. You would see him everywhere. He was just a really nice guy.’
