The last person to ever see John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and her sister, Lauren Bessette, alive felt a “deep concern” as he watched them climb into their doomed small plane nearly three decades ago.
Kyle Bailey, a licensed pilot, was so worried about the weather conditions on that fateful night in 1999 that he canceled his own flight out of the Essex County Airport, from where the trio would also depart.
Despite the premonition, Bailey didn’t verbalize his uneasiness to Kennedy, who would crash into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard just hours later.
“I went home to my mother that night and said something to the effect of, ‘I just saw JFK Jr. at the airport. I hope he doesn’t kill himself someday in that airplane,’” Bailey recalled to Fox News.
Bailey — who has long spoken about his concerns for that day’s weather — recounts the events leading up to the tragedy in his new book “Witness: JFK Jr.’s Fatal Flight,” and amid a renewed fascination with the young Kennedy couple.
Everything seemed normal that day, with the “George” publisher zipping past Bailey to buy a bottle of water and a banana from the convenience store ahead of his flight.
The weather was hot and humid, which Bailey described as a “typical New York City July day and evening” — until the rising temperatures caused the visibility to get worse into the night.
“I was noticing that the temperature and dew point, those spreads were getting closer and closer,” he explained. “In weather, what that means is, there’s a very high probability of ground fog developing. In John’s case, perhaps he wasn’t told that or didn’t know. You really can’t fault him for that, for what he doesn’t know or what he wasn’t told.”
“I knew from experience on those very hot, hazy, humid summer nights, fog and low visibility could be a problem, especially flying over water,” he shared.
“In John’s case, especially at nighttime, he was planning on leaving after I was going to. It would’ve been more challenging for a [Visual Flight Rules] pilot with hazy, hot, humid conditions, a partial horizon, and now, on top of that, total darkness.”
“For a VFR pilot at night, when you lose that horizon, it’s like jumping off the edge of the earth into a complete sea of darkness,” Bailey added.
Bailey canceled his flight, but he watched as Kennedy completed his pre-flight checks, the Bessette sisters boarded the aircraft and the small plane take off at 8:38 p.m.
The young pilot didn’t notice if an instructor had boarded with the family and didn’t know that Kennedy had reportedly told his instructor that he “wanted to do it alone.”
“I saw the three of them board the plane, but since I wasn’t fixed on that plane the entire time, I wasn’t sure if an instructor walked over there. That’s why I didn’t say anything. I just hoped he had an instructor with him. The conditions weren’t horrible, but they weren’t great,” recalled Bailey.
“That Piper Saratoga was a new airplane for him. It was complex and high-performance, unlike his older airplane, which he had just sold. I really hoped he had his instructor with him. I was just concerned for him. Was it a premonition? Possibly. But it was more of a deep concern for John and the two others.”
The plan was for Kennedy to drop Lauren Bessette off at Martha’s Vineyard before continuing on with his wife to attend his cousin’s wedding in Hyannis Port.
Investigators say the plane crashed just over an hour later. Kennedy had suffered spatial disorientation over the water due to the visual conditions.
The plane and the three bodies were recovered five days later.
“After the tragedy, a lot of people would come up to me and say, ‘Why did you let him take off? Why didn’t you say something?’” said Bailey. “The answer is, I didn’t know who was on the plane with them.”