On July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane took to the air from a runway in Essex County, New Jersey, en route to Martha’s Vinyard, where he was due to drop off his sister-in-law before he and his wife Carolyn took off again to Cape Cod, where they were planning to attend a wedding. The aircraft was a Piper Saratoga, a light aircraft that Kennedy Jr., who had just 300 hours of flight experience under his belt, would steer by eye having yet to pass the exam to use flight instruments. The journey was around 200 miles, but despite the conditions and his relative lack of flight experience, Kennedy Jr. had declined to be accompanied by a flight instructor.
Conditions were dark and hazy, and as the aircraft approached Martha’s Vinyard, the sky and the sea became interchangeable. It is believed that Kennedy, who issued no distress call, lost control of the plane which plummeted thousands of feet in the space of a few seconds, suggesting that Kennedy Jr. had become severely spatially disorientated. All three died on impact.
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Shortly after the crash, a recovery team undertook the grim and grueling task of recovering the bodies from the bottom of the ocean, while the National Transportation Safety Board set about its investigation into why the deadly crash happened.
