A Race Against the Atlantic: Search Commander Recalls Finding JFK Jr. Before the Current Could Carry Him Away

The search for John F. Kennedy Jr. had stretched across days and miles of Atlantic water when the people leading it confronted a difficult possibility: They might have to stop without bringing him home.

Then came the breakthrough.

Kennedy’s remains were located in 116 feet of water off Martha’s Vineyard, near the wreckage of the airplane he had been piloting. According to the Coast Guard captain who led the mission, another day of strong underwater currents might have made the recovery impossible.

Retired Capt. W. Russell “Russ” Webster recounts the operation in The Last Flight: The Untold Story of the Search for JFK Jr. and the Race Against the Atlantic, written with his wife, maritime historian Theresa Mitchell Webster.

In an account published Oct. 24, Webster described a search approaching a critical decision by its fourth day. Crews had covered an enormous area, but the missing aircraft and its three occupants remained elusive.

The concern was no longer simply where to look. It was whether the ocean would leave anything recoverable when searchers finally reached the right place.

Kennedy, 38, died July 16, 1999, when his single-engine Piper Saratoga crashed into the Atlantic. His wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, 33, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, 34, also were killed.

The flight had left New Jersey with a planned stop at Martha’s Vineyard to drop off Lauren. Kennedy and Carolyn intended to continue to Hyannis for his cousin Rory Kennedy’s wedding.

Instead, the aircraft went down about 7½ miles southwest of the Vineyard during a nighttime descent. The National Transportation Safety Board later concluded that Kennedy lost control because of spatial disorientation, with haze and darkness contributing. Investigators found no evidence of a mechanical malfunction before impact. libraryonline.erau.edu

The disappearance triggered an extensive search involving aircraft, ships, sonar equipment and personnel from numerous agencies. As the days passed, the effort shifted from finding survivors to locating wreckage and recovering the victims.

Sonar eventually helped narrow the search to the aircraft’s resting place. Navy divers recovered all three bodies July 21, five days after the crash. HISTORY

In his new account, Webster said Kennedy’s body was outside the aircraft, approximately 10 feet from the wreckage, and vulnerable to a current moving at roughly 1.6 knots.

“John F. Kennedy Jr. was outside the aircraft, and there was a consideration that had another day passed … he might’ve been swept away,” Webster said.

That description differs from contemporaneous reporting that placed Kennedy’s body in the cockpit or fuselage. The precise position of his remains should therefore be understood as Webster’s retrospective account rather than an uncontested detail of the recovery.

His wife emphasized the possibility that the search could have ended without finding him.

“They might have never found him had another day gone by,” she said.

That was a feared outcome, not something anyone could establish with certainty. But it captures the pressure facing the recovery crews: The search area was vast, the targets were small, and conditions beneath the surface continued changing while teams worked.

Webster estimates that the operation cost as much as $5 million and involved thousands of personnel from 28 local, state and federal agencies. The effort extended across waters between Cape Cod and Long Island.

The couple’s book draws on Webster’s experience and accounts from others involved. He said some participants became more willing to discuss the mission after retiring from federal service, allowing a fuller account to emerge decades later.

For the public, the tragedy unfolded through television updates, photographs of search vessels and an increasingly grim wait for news.

For those offshore, it was a succession of operational decisions: where to search, which sonar returns to investigate and how long to continue.

The recovery brought an answer to the families. Webster’s account underscores how uncertain that answer remained until searchers finally reached the ocean floor.