JFK Jr.’s Chilling Last Words to His Flight Instructor Before His Death Revealed as Sources Claim ‘Poor Judgement’ Killed Him & Carolyn
The tragic death of JFK Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette, is taking center stage as Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette comes to an end. And though the show has been called by the Kennedy family for being anything but faithful to the couple’s story, the result was always going to be the same. A fatal plane crash that took the lives of JFK Jr., his wife, and her sister, Lauren.
But what exactly happened to the plane? We know that the small plane JFK Jr. was piloting crashed into the ocean on July 16, 1999, killing JFK Jr., his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren. In 2000, the National Transportation Safety Board declared in a report that the most likely cause of the crash was pilot error.
There’s more, however. As JFK Jr. prepared for his flight to Martha’s Vineyard for Rory Kennedy’s wedding, he told his flight instructor, Bob Merena, that he didn’t need him. According to the National Transportation Safety Board report, he said, “he wanted to do it alone.”
Kennedy departed from Essex Airport in Caldwell, N.J., and was supposed to fly to Martha’s Vineyard to drop off Lauren, and then on to Hyannis Port for the wedding of his cousin. The plane never made it to Martha’s Vineyard.
Jeff Guzzetti, who was part of the NTSB investigation into the causes of the crash, shared the flight plan in the 2024 book JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography, written by People editor at large Liz McNeil and John’s close friend RoseMarie Terenzio. He explained that the plane took off just after sunset, and “followed the Connecticut and Rhode Island coastline and then he turned out to sea to head towards Martha’s Vineyard.”
He explained that, “His flight path into the water is indicative of something called spatial disorientation,” adding, “His inner ears were playing tricks with his sense of orientation. Your inner ear says you’re turning to the left and you’re actually not. So you correct to the right, thinking that you’re leveling the airplane.”
“The airplane makes a spiral nose-down…down to the grave, kind of like going down a drain. The plane went into one final turn and it stayed in that turn all the way down to the ocean.”
Guzzetti says the passengers probably didn’t know what was happening. “They might’ve felt a little g-force pushing them down in their seats. You would’ve heard the rush of air over the fuselage accelerate or get louder, during the final fatal plunge. Perhaps feel yourself accelerating a little bit. And then they hit the surface of the water and it’s over.” But the pilot probably had a clearer sense.
“I would expect that the pilot would be very confused and perhaps a little frightened because the instruments may have not been matching up with how he was feeling,” he said, adding, “It was a dark night, the moon wasn’t well lit, there was haze. He was likely in over his head.”
Kennedy’s friend, historian Steven M. Gillon, told People, “At the first sign of danger, he should have done what a lot of pilots did that night and flew inland, away from the ocean, spend the night somewhere and then pick up the next morning,…It was [John’s] poor judgment that led to his death and the death of his wife and his sister-in-law, and there’s no way around that. John bears the responsibility of his recklessness that night and John alone.”
