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According to radar records, an apparently flummoxed Kennedy now made a sudden bank to the right, away from his intended destination, and climbed briefly back up to 2,600 ft. Perhaps he was still searching for a break in the haze, or perhaps merely stumbling about. If he followed his flight training--and his reputation as a generally cautious pilot suggests he would have--he would now have performed what's known as "the scan," a quick survey of half-a-dozen key instruments that would reveal his plane's altitude, attitude and direction. But his brief experience with instrument piloting--he was certified to fly only under eyeball conditions--left him ill-equipped to handle a confusing situation. As the dials on the panel and the signals in his brain told him two different things, his eyes probably bounced back and forth between the instruments and the windows in a frantic attempt to reconcile the two. "He was like a blind man trying to find his way out of a room," a Piper Saratoga pilot surmises.
And like a blind man, he now completely lost his way. After holding altitude at 2,600 ft. for about a minute, the plane again turned right and began descending. Assuming Kennedy was still scanning his instruments, the dial that would probably have seized his attention was his rapidly unspooling altimeter. Inexperienced pilots often focus on this dial alone and do the logical thing to reverse its plunge: pull hard on the nose to try to level out the plane. But without a practiced ability to read all the instruments, Kennedy may unknowingly have been not only descending but also turning. Pulling up the nose without first leveling the wings and dampening the turn would only tighten the spin, putting the plane into a so-called graveyard spiral. Within seconds, the plane was plummeting toward the water at 5,000 ft. per min.
Trying to guess the atmosphere in the cockpit during the last 15 sec. or so before the plane hit the sea will always be speculation--and grim speculation at that. It was probably terrifying as the trajectory steepened. It was almost certainly quick--mercifully quick--when the last bit of sky ran out and the water met the plane like an asphalt runway. Death, at that speed, is instantaneous, and well before the wreckage of the Saratoga could descend the 116 ft. to the bottom of the darkened Atlantic, its three occupants were gone.
The Martha's Vineyard airport is a tiny place, a collection of modest buildings that are more bungalows than terminals. When the occasional military cargo plane has to land there, it looks almost comically whalelike sitting on the tiny ribbon of runway. If you were planning to meet someone arriving by private plane at a certain time on a Friday night, you'd know almost immediately if your party hadn't shown up. When a couple approached Adam Budd, a 21-year-old airport intern, and reported that they were there to meet a Lauren Bessette but that she hadn't arrived, there was thus little possibility that they had simply missed her at the gate. At 10:05, Budd phoned the FAA station in Bridgeport, Conn., and asked if someone could track Kennedy's plane. The FAA, unsure who Budd was, explained that this was not the kind of information given out over the phone.