Original subtitles

Man: If you were to have a son,

would you encourage a political career for him?

Kennedy: Oh, definitely.

I would hope he would grow up to be

if not a politician in the sense

of devoting all of his time,

I would hope that whatever he did do,

that he would have some sense of responsibility

for what went on.

Couric: When you hear him talk about that,

do you ever feel like your choice

not to pursue a career in public service

might have disappointed him? -No.

I can't imagine that he would have said anything different

being asked that question under those circumstances.

You know, he'd always said that he thought

everyone should run for office.

And, listen, there's a lot of time in life

to do all sorts of things.

♪♪

♪♪

Hey, everyone. Welcome to "How It Really Happened."

I'm Hill Harper.

July 17, 1999, we woke up to shocking news.

John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn,

and her sister Lauren were missing,

last seen aboard a private plane headed for Martha's Vineyard

with John at the controls.

Tonight, our examination into the crash.

Did the plane malfunction?

Was it sabotaged?

Or was John himself somehow responsible?

Let's find out what really happened.

-How you doing today? All right? -Good. How are you?

Man: How do you think your mother would have felt about this?

About this outside? She would have been amused.

Kagan: Here's the latest now on the search for John F. Kennedy Jr.,

his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy

and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette.

The first thing we knew was the plane was missing,

and that was really all we knew.

Tuchman: He had just gotten his private pilot's license a year earlier

and, by all accounts, just loved to fly.

Public life and politics is both serious and fun.

Man: The U.S. coast guard is conducting a search

off of the coast of New York

extending now up to Martha's Vineyard.

They were going to leave from New Jersey

and make a pit stop at Martha's Vineyard

and then go on to Hyannis Port for the family wedding.

The plane is reported as overdue and missing.

It's unusual for a private plane to go missing that long.

The plane was expected to arrive in the Hyannis Port area

or Martha's Vineyard area around midnight of last night.

It did not show up.

I'm honored to be here in the White House.

Man: At Philbin Beach in Massachusetts,

luggage and what the coast guard

believes to be parts of the plane have washed ashore.

We just did not believe that the worst could have happened,

and it was many days before that was confirmed,

and for each and every one of those days,

I refused to believe that he was gone until it was official.

King: Tonight, the victims of the JFK Jr. plane crash

have been found and recovered.

Investigators are trying to figure out what went wrong.

Andersen: It was so devastating because,

you know, John was always there, and there's a reason for that,

because we never really had anybody as close to royalty,

as close to an American Prince, in a sense,

as John F. Kennedy Jr.

Man: John! Woman: Can we get a shot looking here, please?

Cuomo: He understood keenly how he was perceived

and what he meant to people, and it never bittered him,

which is, like, almost impossible to believe.

He would introduce himself to everyone as John Kennedy.

"Hi. My name is John Kennedy,"

even though the entire world knew who he was.

He never had that presumption of, "Well, you know who I am."

One of the things that I think people didn't appreciate John

was how funny he was.

There is one other wedding dress in the world

exactly like my wife Carolyn's,

and I believe it's owned by Dennis Rodman.

[ Laughter ]

Bradley: He was great with voices.

He did a dead-on Schwarzenegger imitation.

Berman: There wasn't a big difference in the way

John lived or the way any of us lived.

I mean, he would go to his apartment,

and, you know, he'd be over in the kitchen

with a -- you know, some crummy blender making margaritas.

Woman: How come you didn't speak?

'Cause Carolyn did all the work,

so she should do all the speaking.

-You're such a good speaker. -[ Chuckles ]

He just seemed like, you know, as normal a guy

as you could ever be for being a Kennedy.

Man: Can you answer one question, John?

Mr. Kennedy?

You can't just answer one question, if you're happy?

He didn't have a mean bone in his body.

He just didn't.

What?

I won't. [ Chuckles ]

And he was a very attractive guy with very attractive qualities.

I have a pretty normal life, surprisingly.

I mean, you know, every now and then

sort of strange things happen.

When they found the wreckage of the plane and the bodies,

I mean, it -- we didn't go home after that

because the story was still in full swing.

There was still a lot of mystery about what happened,

and so we stayed far long time while the NTSB and investigators

were trying to piece together what had gone so terribly wrong.

Just a few months before the flight,

John purchased a new plane.

I ran into JFK Jr. at a wedding where we had a long

and very detailed conversation about aviation.

I said, "John, lookit.

The airplane you're thinking of getting,

this Piper Saratoga, it's a very high-performance plane

but it is easy to kind of, you know, lose control of

if you're not really on it.

My advice to you would be to buy an A-36,

which is a very stable instrument platform.

Well, that would be my advice," which he didn't take.

The type of plane JFK Jr. acquired was a Piper Saratoga.

It's a 300-plus horsepower engine.

John's previous airplane, a Cessna 182,

was an older airplane.

It was a little bit less complex as the Piper Saratoga.

John Kennedy had been flying

for I think approximately 18 months,

had something over 300 flight hours,

but this was a new aircraft that he had purchased

and he did not have as much experience in this aircraft

as he had in the previous aircraft he had owned.

In aviation, most accidents are not a result

of a single catastrophic event.

It's usually a chain of multiple small events.

I have a theory which I call the falling-domino theory.

So if you could imagine dominos stacked in a line,

each domino would represent a very small event

that's happening or a problem.

Lonnstrom: Once you make one mistake, that leads to another mistake,

which leads to another mistake, which leads to another mistake.

We call it falling behind the curve.

Bailey: In John's case,

there was less than a dozen events

that would represent each domino or a problem.

Once one of these dominos start to fall,

they're taking everything with it,

and the end result would be catastrophe.

And that's what happened here.

Carolyn called me from the emergency room.

She was upset, and she was not someone who would cry

and get upset all the time, so I knew it was bad.

This magazine has always been an exploration of political issues,

and it's a way to engage the political process.

In the weeks leading up to this flight that he took,

John had a lot of stress in his life.

Terenzio: John had a meeting with the publisher of the magazine,

and they said that they were not going to continue

their partnership with him,

and he was starting to look for funding elsewhere.

If somebody else would have picked upGeorge

I think we would have moved, but it was uncertain.

Terenzio: It was a tough time for John,

but I think especially stressful for John was Anthony's illness.

Anthony Radziwill was John's cousin,

and they were like brothers.

They were closer than any --

probably any family member of John's is -- was to him.

I think John was having a very hard time

dealing with the fact

that Anthony was probably going to die soon.

Radziwill: And the doctors basically said

there's really nothing more that they can do

and suggested just going somewhere as peaceful

and quiet and enjoyable,

and we decided then to spend the summer at the vineyard

in John and Carolyn's house, and that's where we were.

Memorial Day weekend, John had his new toy.

I called it a flying lawnmower.

It kind of looked like a sit-down lawnmower

with a parachute.

Man: You want to knock out a couple 360s for me?

-Sure. -Good.

We'll bring it down.

Andersen: He brings it in just over the tops of the trees

and in for a very, very rough landing.

And, unfortunately, he broke his ankle.

What happened to your foot, here?

You're in a cast this evening.

Yeah, I'm in a cast. I broke my ankle.

It's the first weekend of the summer,

and I'm laid up for a couple weeks.

Terenzio: John was so active, and especially in the summer,

doing things outdoors.

You know, it sucked for him.

Radziwill: Carolyn called me from the emergency room.

She was upset, and she was not someone who would cry

and get upset all the time, so I knew it was bad,

and she was very worried about him.

It was just going to be a lot to handle

on top of everything else

that we were dealing with that summer.

Amanpour: I spent the last weekend of his life

with him at his estate in Martha's Vineyard.

And when we left, I know John was going on to Canada

to try to drum up some more money

and advertising and support forGeorge.

And he said, "Next week,

I'm going to my cousin's wedding in Hyannis Port, Rory,

but why don't you all come up the following week?"

So we said, "Okay," and, "Great, lovely. Bye."

And we all waved, and I still remember him waving

and walking across to his plane on the tarmac.

My partner, Michael Berman, and I startedGeorge

and bring a fresh new style to the way we cover politics.

Terenzio: The week leading up to the accident,

there was a lot going on.

He was working a lot of hours, and he was not home a lot,

and Carolyn, I think, was feeling a little fatigued

by all of the pressures,

and she really wanted some downtime with John.

And I think it was frustrating to her

that she didn't see a light

at the end of the tunnel in terms of,

"When are we ever just going to be a married couple

who can hang out and spend time together?"

And she wasn't going to go to the wedding.

I said, "Look, this is going to look really bad for John

if you don't show up at the wedding.

People talk enough about you guys and about what's going on

and what's not going on with you,

and I just think you have to go.

His whole family's going to be there,

and I think you have to go."

And she said okay.

[ Voice breaking ] I don't know for sure

if she wouldn't have gone.

I like to think she would have anyway, but I'll --

I'll never feel good about having had that conversation.

Man: How is everything?

Everything is wonderful.

[ Chuckles ]

Andersen: The plan was that John was going to fly with Carolyn

to his cousin Rory's wedding in Hyannis Port,

and they were going to take Carolyn's sister Lauren

and drop her off in Martha's Vineyard.

Lonnstrom: An instructor offered to go with him,

and John turned him down, and he said,

"No, I want to do this alone."

Quest: Until now, most of John's flying, certainly at night,

had been with an instructor.

If the aircraft had become unstable,

if the horizon had been lost,

if they were in challenging circumstances,

the instructor would've taken over

or would have guided John in the flying of the aircraft.

They'd be alive today.

Bailey: JFK Jr. made that trip countless times on Friday night

and then returned on Sunday night.

There was no reason to be concerned about him

flying up that night.

Quest: However, he's seen boarding the plane with crutches,

and it immediately raises the question,

"Was he in a fit state to manipulate the --

the rudder controls on the plane?"

King: That still exists, that togetherness in the Kennedys?

-Yeah. -It doesn't go away, right?

No, it's one of the great lucky things

about being in my family,

which I am -- which has stayed.

Radziwill: That Friday, they were going to a wedding in Hyannis,

and Carolyn's sister Lauren had decided

she was going to spend the weekend in the vineyard,

and they were going to drop her off on the way to Hyannis.

But they never made it.

Andersen: It was a hot Friday.

John was working in his office in Times Square,

the offices ofGeorge.

That last day was, in many ways, an ordinary summer Friday.

I had lunch with John, and it was a nice lunch,

although you could tell that John was a little bit tired.

And we walked back to the office,

and we were talking about plans for the weekend,

and John told me that he was going to be

flying to Hyannis Port,

and...

I was a little concerned.

And I made a joke.

I said to John --

I said, "John, just don't crash, okay?

Because we need you."

[ Chuckles ]

I wish I could take it back.

I wish that I could have said instead,

"John, I wish maybe you should just let

somebody drive you up this time.

It's been a long week.

I know you're a little tired.

I know your foot hurts.

Just be careful, okay?"

Terenzio: The plan was that John was going to meet Lauren,

Carolyn's sister, in the lobby of the building,

and then Carolyn was going to meet them at the airport.

He got out of the office later than he wanted to.

There was traffic.

Arnot: I remember it was the worst traffic I had seen in 20 years.

I mean, it was unbelievably bad.

He had expected to leave in daylight

and, of course, ended up leaving in twilight.

They actually arrived an hour later

than they had planned at the airport.

Man: With us right now is a pilot who was also flying in his plane

to Martha's Vineyard last night,

coincidentally happened to see John F. Kennedy

get on his plane and watch his plane take off.

This is Kyle Bailey.

He got to the airport probably around 8:00-ish, 8:10 P.M.

very inconspicuous -- white t-shirt, casual clothing.

Did he have crutches? 'Cause he had an injury.

I thought I saw one crutch, and I saw him limping.

Quest: He's seen boarding the plane on the night,

the Friday night, with crutches,

and it immediately raises the question,

"Was he in a fit state to manipulate the --

the rudder controls on the plane?"

That turns the plane left and turns the plane right.

We don't know, is the short answer, of what effect,

if any, this had on what happened.

Bailey: He actually did do a run-up on the airplane,

which is he was checking

the various components of the airplane,

making sure the engine was functioning properly.

It struck me as a little bit odd.

What went through my mind was maybe possibly

he was checking a previous problem,

perhaps, that he had on the airplane.

My plans that Friday

were to fly to Martha's Vineyard in my aircraft.

I decided to scrub my plans that night

because of the reduced visibility conditions.

JFK Jr. did check the weather that evening,

and the report was roughly nine miles of visibility.

Now, the actual weather was nowhere near that.

We know from other pilots that were flying that same route

and that same air space that the haze and the mist was very bad.

Arnot: The basic discrepancy was this.

There were two different systems.

There was an automatic system which misgauged the weather

and led forecasters to say nine miles visibility.

In aviation terms,

the weather forecast that JFK Jr. got

was just plain wrong,

and it's that forecast that accounted for his death.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

Radziwill: Carolyn called me from the plane

right before they were taking off,

and I think it was probably a little bit after 8:00.

I don't remember anything

really important from that conversation.

I didn't certainly think it would be the last time

I would speak to my friend.

I remember at the end she said, you know, "I love you."

And I -- for some reason,

I didn't say, "I love you," back,

and that always stuck with me,

and she said, "I'll call you when I land,"

and then that was the last I ever heard from her or anyone.

It wasn't until 8:38 that they took off.

Camerota: The NTSB report, which was issued later,

tells us a little bit about what happened.

The tower controller issues a takeoff clearance.

John acknowledges the takeoff clearance and then, it says,

"A few seconds later, the tower controller asked the pilot

if he was heading towards Teterboro,

to which he applied 'No, sir.

Actually, I'm heading a little north of it eastbound."

"The tower controller then instructed the pilot

to make a right downwind departure.

This was acknowledged by the pilot at 2038:56.

There was no record of any further communications

between the pilot and air traffic control."

So we thought that that was the last time

that anyone had spoken to John,

but it turns out that might not be true.

Bailey: All the way at the end of the NTSB accident report,

we have two witness statements.

So that evening, I overheard an aircraft calling,

which I thought was calling Republic operations

and ended up being Martha's Vineyard's operations.

I had not heard about these before.

These appear likely to be

the very last transmissions of JFK Jr.

This is going to be your life --

editing, publishing, magazines, writing?

Is that it?

Well, I mean, starting a magazine is a huge enterprise,

and it's enormously exciting.

This is what we're doing, you know, and --

For the time being, or you want to stay with it?

Well, I would hate to say I'm going to do anything

till I'm 70, but I'm going to be doing this

for the foreseeable future.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to "How It Really Happened."

Friday evening, July 16th, John Kennedy Jr.

boarded his Piper Saratoga along with his passengers in the back,

his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren.

They intended to make a short flight to Martha's Vineyard.

We now know extraordinary details about what happened

during their one hour and three minutes in the air.

Check it out.

♪♪

♪♪

Andersen: At 8:38, he took off with Carolyn and Lauren

aboard the plane and headed towards Martha's Vineyard.

He takes off, and he heads basically northeast.

Andersen: We learned later that John's plane came uncomfortably close

to an American Airlines passenger jet.

As he passes over white plains,

the pilot of that jet is warned by air traffic controllers

that this small aircraft is near him

and that he should pay attention.

They didn't come close enough to crash,

but they came close enough to scare everybody.

The pilot of the American Airlines

says to the controller at LaGuardia,

"That plane's not talking to anybody?"

And the LaGuardia guy says, "No, he's not talking to anybody."

And he never did.

You can imagine if he had this kind of trouble

navigating early in the flight,

he might have trouble later in the flight.

Then he continued along the Connecticut coastline

and then the Rhode Island coastline,

and then rather than continuing along the coast,

where he would have been able to see the ground and be oriented,

he went directly out over the ocean to Martha's Vineyard.

Between Point Judith and Martha's Vineyard,

you have this black, inky air space over open water

where there would have been no clues at all.

There was no land to see. There were no lights.

There was nothing.

And at that point, he's made a fatal error.

At the end

of the National Transportation Safety Board report,

we have these two very interesting

and odd witness statements.

Camerota: These witness reports are extraordinary

because they reveal something that none of us knew before,

and that is that there may have been people

who spoke to John right before he crashed.

Arnot: "Mr. Lagudi is employed

at Republic Airport, Farmingdale, New York.

On the night of the accident,

approximately 21:20 eastern daylight time," or 9:20,

"He was monitoring the UNICOM frequency 122.95 megahertz.

What a UNICOM frequency is,

is generally a fixed-base operator,

or a person who handles, say, the fueling of the airplane

or unloading baggage of the airplane.

Camerota: "During that time,

Mr. Perez heard several transmissions from a pilot

that used a call sign similar to November 9253 November."

Arnot: "During a period of approximately 10 minutes,

the pilot attempted to contact 'someone at Martha's Vineyard.'"

Bailey: "One last transmission was heard.

The pilot stated, 'We're not going to make it

if we don't get a hold of the facility.'"

In July of 1999, I was working at Republic Airport

in Farmingdale, New York,

in the crash-fire rescue division at the airport.

[ Radio chatter ]

We had this radio on our desk all the time,

and it was very common that we had the flights in and out,

and you'd hear all sorts of radio traffic,

you know, not just calling Republic operations.

That evening, I overheard an aircraft

calling which I thought was calling Republic operations

and ended up being Martha's Vineyard's operations.

And, you know, over the next 10, 15 minutes,

you know, there was more repeated calls,

and not that it was frantic or anything like that,

this wasn't any kind of distress call,

but after that 15-minute period,

you could kind of hear the tone of the voice

just kind of maybe getting a little bit more annoyed,

but definitely some type of frustration in there,

so I called back.

I was just like, you know,

"Aircraft, we're calling Martha's Vineyard.

This is Republic airport, again."

You know, "Is -- anything I could help you with?"

And just a general statement, cool, calm and collect was,

"Yeah, we're just trying to reach Martha's Vineyard to let,

you know, our people know that

we're not going to make the airport."

I looked up the phone number for Martha's Vineyard's operation.

There was no answer at that phone number.

I think I ended up calling, like, two or three times

and just didn't get an answer.

At this point, I wrote down the tail number just out of habit.

Any time we pick up a radio,

we'd always kind of just jot it down.

That was it.

I didn't find out what happened until about 3:30 the next day

showing back up for work,

getting ready to relieve the day crew.

You know, they were like, "Oh, did you hear what happened?

JFK Jr.'s plane is missing."

And it's like, "Oh, yeah? Oh."

Still at this point, no, you know, alarm or concern.

The desperate hunt for John F. Kennedy Jr.

continues at this hour.

17 miles offshore was the last contact

with the Kennedy plane.

Lagudi: But it wasn't until later that evening

we started watching the news on TV,

and then the news had shown an actual picture of his plane

from the side that showed his tail number.

And the gentleman that I was working with,

he looked at me, and I looked at him,

and the tail number kind of rang a bell.

We pulled out the paper out of the garbage,

and, sure enough, the tail numbers matched.

It was a bit of a shock, you know?

It was like, "Oh, my God."

As it turns out, the UNICOM radio frequency

that these guys were monitoring is the same radio frequency

that they use at the Martha's Vineyard airport.

So it is feasible that the voice that they heard

and the person that they were listening to

was John Jr. that night.

Quest: He said, "It's likely

we're not going to make Martha's Vineyard."

And we don't really know what it means.

It's there. It's hanging there.

But if you look at the timing of it,

it's about 20 minutes or so

before he starts his final descent.

I had not heard about these before.

These appear likely to be

the very last transmissions of JFK Jr.

What is fascinating is that the line between total success

and absolute catastrophe is very narrow.

Radziwill: I'm calling John's friend in Hyannis

and screaming into the phone,

"Please, you have to find somebody in John's family

to tell them what's going on."

Woman: I was wondering, John, what aspect of your personality

do you credit your mother the most

for having instilled in you?

I think that there's a sense of not worrying too much

about things that you can't control,

just sort of living your life and doing what you feel

and where your interests take you.

♪♪

It was a very spooky, even scary, place to be,

over those waters, over the vineyard

that particular weekend.

I made a nearly identical flight to JFK Jr.

at nearly the same time.

We went past Martha's Vineyard,

and I have a device called a moving map display.

The display said I was two-and-a-half miles

from Martha's Vineyard.

So without looking out the window,

I said to my nephew, Tyler,

I said, "Tyler, there's Martha's Vineyard."

And he goes, "Where? I don't see anything."

I mean, this is totally unpredicted.

The weather never said this.

Quest: If you look at what his instructors said,

John Kennedy was an average pilot who showed promise,

he showed some skill,

but he was by no means an exceptional pilot,

and what he encountered on this Friday night

were challenging flying conditions that took him

to the edge of the envelope of his experience.

There's two ways to fly.

One is visual, and the other is instrument.

VFR is visual flight rules.

It literally means flying by looking out of the window.

You can see the horizon.

You can see where you're going.

IFR, instrument flight rules -- completely different.

This is where you fly only by using the instruments

because the visibility outside is either so bad

or it's nighttime and you have no horizon.

You're over water.

In this situation,

you are literally looking only at the instruments.

John Kennedy, he had done some training towards IFR,

but he was not qualified for it.

Lonnstrom: These weather forecasts were wrong.

So he actually is in instrument conditions,

but he doesn't know it.

He needs a horizon to fly.

He's not qualified to fly with his instruments,

so he needs this horizon,

and he needs to keep that plane level with that horizon,

and he sees no horizon, so he can't do that.

It's just pitch black,

and that's where he lost control.

Andersen: He becomes spatially disoriented.

You can't tell up from down or left from right.

You don't know where you are.

Your body is telling you one thing

when the reality is something entirely different.

[ Radio chatter ]

The inner ear is saying,

"Hang on. We feel a movement to the left,"

but the brain's not seeing anything like this movement.

The brain's just seeing nothing,

and now your inner ear is telling you,

"Hang on. We're banking left," but, no,

you're banking, actually, right.

What the NTSB suggests happens is he starts the descent,

and he continues a normal descent.

Then he does a turn, then climbs again,

then he does another turn in the opposite direction,

then he climbs again, and then he starts a long descent

which gets steeper and steeper all the way.

Lonnstrom: There's a natural tendency

when you're descending to pull back on the yoke

because that makes the plane go up if you're level.

But if you're already spinning and you pull back on the yoke,

it puts you in the graveyard spiral,

and that's what happened to him.

Quest: What is fascinating is that the line between total success

and absolute catastrophe is very narrow.

He could've been lucky this night,

and he might have just got one glimpse

of one piece of the horizon

that would have allowed him to get control of the aircraft

or see where he was going or manage his flying.

But that line is so narrow, and, of course,

he fell on the wrong side.

Once he started to pull up, he had no chance.

During the NTSB investigation, they looked,

and they said that the airspeed indicator

was mechanically at its highest stop,

meaning he was going in excess of 200 miles an hour.

What we can tell you is that it was a catastrophic crash.

They know that all three people

aboard that plane died from the impact.

Among the many, many tragic, heartbreaking ironies

is the fact that John's plane went down within sight

of his mother's beloved Red Gate Farm estate

on Martha's Vineyard.

The plane went down just before 10:00 P.M.,

but it was a number of hours

before anyone realized that they were missing.

The phone rang at midnight,

and I got this -- this sick feeling in my stomach,

and it was John's friend Pinkie.

And he said, you know, "Are they there with you?

I'm at the airport, and they're not here."

And then -- and then I thought, "Oh [bleep]"

And I just bolted out of bed.

I spent 15 years as a journalist and producer at ABC News,

and I thought, "Okay, I need to, like,

figure out this story and solve it somehow.

I need to figure out where they are because they're somewhere."

One call led to another to another to another,

and I called the Hyannis airport many times

'cause I assumed that they had made a mistake.

And the whole time, I'm calling John's friend

and screaming into the phone,

"Please, you have to find somebody in John's family

to tell them what's going on."

It was probably between 2:00 or 3:00 when I realized

I had to call the coast guard and report John's plane missing.

I said, "My cousin is missing," and then he took the name,

and I think there was a little bit of a --

like, a gasp on the other end of the phone.

Andersen: The NTSB launched an investigation

following the crash, and they discovered

that there was something actually on the plane

that could've saved his life.

We'll be including your calls for John F. Ken--

Do you still use the junior? -No.

I mean, but I don't not use it.

You use the initials?

Sometimes, but generally not.

You're your own man, aren't you, John?

You want your own bewilderment. We'll be right back.

He's in the right business, media.

We'll be right back. Don't go way.

Larrabee: We found the airplane at a location

southwest of Martha's Vineyard.

Hall: In excess of 70% of the aircraft

was brought up to the surface by the United States Navy,

done under the close examination and supervision

of the board investigators.

Larrabee: The plane was in pretty tough shape.

The engine had been driven back into the cockpit.

It looked like it almost had gone in nose-first.

Well, these propellers hit the water with such force

that they were bent into a curve.

Hall: Investigators oversaw the transfer of the wreckage

to a hangar on shore

and a thorough additional investigation of the aircraft

took place that time.

Andersen: The NTSB launched an investigation

following the crash, and they discovered

there was something actually on the plane

that could've saved his life.

Arnot: JFK Jr.'s airplane was a very sophisticated aircraft,

and it had an autopilot.

Bailey: So the question that was on everybody's mind was,

"If he could just push one or two buttons,

why did this incident happen?"

Quest: We know from previous flights,

that John Kennedy has played around with this

with his flight instructor, but he has not used it before.

Arnot: So one of the greatest tragedies here

is that there was that fully functioning autopilot

in the aircraft that could've saved his life,

saved the lives of those two young women,

and yet it wasn't engaged.

It seems crazy.

The NTSB report was released about 11 months later.

Hall: The investigation determined

that the probable cause of the accident

was the pilot's spatial disorientation.

Lonnstrom: I believe he made mistakes on this flight.

Some of them are relatively minor

and would not have caused the accident,

but a contributing factor.

Arnot: It's always a chain of events that ends up in a disaster.

The traffic was terrible.

He took off too late.

He didn't have a copilot.

He took a course over the ocean.

He was stressed.

Lonnstrom: The weather forecast certainly shares some blame.

So you take all of these factors together,

and they snowball to create this tragedy

that killed JFK Jr. and these two young women.

Cuomo: You just start getting plagued with these two words

that just always surrounded him when he was alive,

and certainly now shadow him in death -- what if?

What if he hadn't flown?

What if he had some other pilot take them?

What if they had driven?

What if? What if? What if?

Larrabee: I survived the World Trade Center.

I was one of the lucky people that survived.

I truly believe that that day people made decisions

of turning right or turning left

and they were life-or-death decisions.

Do I get in an airplane at 8:30 at night on a Friday night

and fly to Martha's Vineyard, or do I wait the next morning?

I mean, if you think about your own life

and the decisions you make every day,

I don't think you could make anybody feel bad

about the fact that he decided to go.

All we know are three young people lost their lives --

John Kennedy, Carolyn, and Lauren Bessette.

Gary Tuchman is on hand at the --

in front of the Tribeca, Manhattan, apartment

that was John F. Kennedy Jr.'s.

After he died, there were vigils outside his apartment.

People holding candles, people crying,

people just wanting to be there.

Andersen: Ultimately, the idea of a burial at sea was agreed upon

because John had spoken of it himself not long before.

Within 24 hours of the bodies being pulled up,

we went out to the crash site and scattered the ashes

from urns there from the end of the boat.

Larrabee: That was kind of an amazing end to this story,

when you think about,

we'd only been out there two days before,

searching for three people,

and now they are being buried at sea.

Tuchman: The funeral was held at the St. Thomas More Church

in Manhattan on the Upper East Side.

Radziwill: It was -- it was a really a hard day.

Terenzio: President and Mrs. Clinton and Chelsea were there

and John's whole family, obviously,

and Muhammad Ali was there,

and it was a beautiful service.

Amanpour: Wyclef Jean sang at the funeral,

and I just remember falling apart at that.

It was really emotional.

Cuomo: Senator Ted Kennedy was a huge figure in John's life,

and he was also the head of the family.

So when John died, it made sense

that we were going to hear from the senator,

but the eulogy that he gave

wound up capturing so much more than people expected.

Here's what he said.

"From the first day of his life,

John seemed to belong not only to our family

but to the American family.

The whole world knew his name before he did."

Radziwill: "But John was so much more than those long-ago images

emblazoned in our minds."

Andersen: "He was a boy who grew into man for a zest for life

and a love of adventure."

Bailey: "He saw things that could be lost in the glare of a spotlight

and he could laugh at the absurdity

of too much pomp and circumstance."

Arnot: "He drove his own car and flew his own plane,

which is how he wanted it."

Quest: "And for 1,000 days, he was a husband who adored

the wife who became his perfect soul mate."

Tuchman: "He was lost on that troubled night,

but we will always wait for him so that his time,

which was not doubled but cut in half,

will live forever in our memory

and in our beguiled and broken hearts."

Camerota: "We dared to think in that other Irish phrase

that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair

with his beloved Carolyn by his side.

But like his father, he had every gift but length of years."

"We who have loved him from the day he was born

and watched the remarkable man he became,

now bid him farewell."

If you're asking if it's hard being me, it's --

Well, it's brought you a unique life.

Absolutely, and great opportunities

and some challenges,

but all in all, I feel very fortunate.

In 2001, a judge granted permission

for the Bessette family

to settle a claim against JFK Jr.'s estate for,

"The wrongful death of their daughters,"

with the Bessettes receiving a payout

reportedly in the millions.

But whether or not he's to blame

for the tragic circumstances of their deaths, there's no doubt

John F. Kennedy Jr. lived an extraordinary life --

a man dedicated to charity work,

his career, his family, and service to our country.

Thanks for watching.

Good night.