Word: essex
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Around 8:10, Kennedy pulled into the West Essex Sunoco station just across the street from the airport. Jack Tabibian, who owns the station, was accustomed to seeing Kennedy stop in when he came out to fly, but never this late. "He usually showed up between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.," Tabibian says. If J.F.K. Jr. was concerned about the late hour and the fast-setting sun, he didn't show it. Walking unhurriedly into the store wearing a light gray T shirt, he made a bit of small talk with Mesfin Gebreegziabher, who was manning the cash register. Gebreegziabher...
...know, but as a pilot, he was clearly up against it. Night was falling, and he had two stops to make that evening: one in Martha's Vineyard to drop off Lauren, then on to Hyannis Port. Earlier, Kyle Bailey, a local pilot, had canceled a planned flight from Essex because of a troubling haze that had already reduced visibility. Bailey decided to ground himself when he looked off in the distance for a familiar mountain ridge but couldn't see it. "That is a test that most pilots use at the airport," he says...
Nonetheless, around 8:30 p.m., shortly after Carolyn arrived in a black radio car, she, Kennedy and Lauren climbed inside the plane and belted themselves into its plush leather seats. At 8:38 p.m., 12 min. after sundown, the Essex tower cleared them for takeoff, and the wheels of the red- and-white Piper Saratoga left the ground...
...line of Long Island, then sails out over water, passing only the relative lily pad of Block Island before reaching Martha's Vineyard. Kennedy chose the water route, and that may have been his undoing. "Fifteen or 20 miles over water is daunting in daylight," says Joe Orlando, an Essex pilot who met Kennedy on the flight strip a few months ago. "At night it's terrifying." Making things worse, much of the East Coast was under a heat-wave haze, reducing visibility even further...
John Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and her sister Lauren, a New York City investment banker, arrived in separate cars at New Jersey's Essex County Airport. John had told friends the day before that he was flying straight to Hyannis; the decision to stop in Martha's Vineyard to drop Lauren off may have come at the last minute. But the weather was clear, and the FAA does not require pilots to file a flight plan when visual flight rules are in place...