Last 36 Hours Of Jfk Jr. Were Typical Of Life -- Details Resonate With Telling Elements Of His Persona

NEW YORK - Last Thursday morning, John F. Kennedy Jr. experienced the simplest of pleasures: He got his cast off. To say his broken ankle had crimped his style would be an understatement.

The best part of getting rid of the cast, he told acquaintances, was that he could at last pilot solo again. Since breaking his ankle in a paraglider crash three weeks earlier, Kennedy had felt the need to fly with a co-pilot. Friday's flight, he told acquaintances with exhilaration, would be his first time alone at the controls since the accident.

If only Kennedy had waited until Monday to see his orthopedist, he likely would have taken along a co-pilot, if grudgingly, and perhaps he, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, might be alive today. This is based on one of the prime theories of the crash - that Kennedy, a relatively green pilot not licensed for instrument landings, lost control of his plane in the haze around Martha's Vineyard, Mass. An experienced co-pilot perhaps could have landed safely, relying on instruments.

The story of Kennedy's last 36 hours resonates not only with taunting what-ifs, but also with telling elements of the persona he fashioned for himself - a celebrity who embraced commonness; an expert in the eyes of friends on the meaning of life, who had uncanny intimacy with the meaning of death.

Among his last written words - an e-mail sent at 4:05 p.m. Friday - was a remarkably uplifting message to a friend, John Perry Barlow, who just had buried his mother after spending her final days at her bedside. Barlow eerily discovered the message late Saturday, well after Kennedy himself was dead. It was not just a condolence, but also a sort of congratulations, Barlow said.

"He understood what it was to be able to be with one's mother as she's dying, to be right there with her," said Barlow, a former lyricist for The Grateful Dead. "I think he was in part congratulating me for being in his club."

As the National Transportation Safety Board looks at the crash of Kennedy's Piper Saratoga 7 1/2 miles off Martha's Vineyard, investigators say they will examine his physical health and his state of mind - anything that might have contributed to the tragedy.

One place to start is early Thursday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, with the seemingly unremarkable removal of Kennedy's cast. He emerged on crutches, his ankle still too tender to bear his full weight, and went straight to the midtown office tower where he edited George magazine, the glossy monthly that treated politics as entertainment.

On Thursday evening, he was picked up at George by a car service and taken to Yankee Stadium, where he was a guest of the Yankees' principal owner, George Steinbrenner. Kennedy, an ardent baseball fan, took along one of his closest friends, Gary Ginsberg, a lawyer who now works for Rupert Murdoch.

Although Steinbrenner often offered his skybox, Kennedy demurred. "He liked being close to where the action was," Steinbrenner said.

A routine day

Friday seemed to be unfolding as a routine day for Kennedy. He met with the magazine's publisher, Hachette Filipacchi Magazines, to talk about obtaining further financing. With George losing advertising and circulation, there had been rumors Hachette might pull the plug, and Kennedy had been courting possible investors. The previous weekend, he had flown his plane to Toronto - with a co-pilot - to meet potential partners. After Friday's meeting, a George staffer said, Kennedy "was really happy about the negotiations."

Also on Friday, Kennedy went to lunch with a group of the magazine's editors and attended an afternoon staff meeting and mentioned with satisfaction to a colleague that the upcoming issue of George had generated considerable "buzz" with an article on congresswoman Mary Bono.

Sources close to Kennedy said he always had planned to leave the office at 6:30 p.m. Friday. That's contrary to earlier reports that he had planned to leave the office early, but was delayed by his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, who had to attend a late office meeting.

Bessette, a principal at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, met him at George, and the two left at 6:45 p.m. for Essex County Airport in Fairfield, N.J., the sources said.

Because of traffic jams, they did not reach the airport until almost 8 p.m. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy arrived there by car service several minutes later.

Aware of his status as a beginning pilot, licensed just over a year ago, Kennedy kept his plane at the small airfield tucked in the suburbs of northern New Jersey rather than at Teterboro Airport, a much larger general-aviation airport just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. A pilot friend said Kennedy considered Teterboro too close to the complex air-traffic patterns of Newark and LaGuardia airports.

Three weeks ago, just after Kennedy crashed his paraglider, Barlow became fearful that Kennedy was becoming too heady about his flying, and warned him to view the accident as a warning.

"You know just enough to be dangerous," Barlow, 51, recalled saying. ". . . You're going to find yourself flying in instrument conditions because you think you can."

Takeoff into the sunset

The sun was just beginning to set as Kennedy, cast-free but limping badly, took his red and white Piper Saratoga II HP through its preflight preparations last Friday.

Kyle Bailey, 25, a pilot with more than a decade of flying experience who also keeps his plane at Essex County Airport and who frequently flies the same route as Kennedy - Fairfield to Martha's Vineyard - took special note of Kennedy that night because Bailey had just decided against making the flight.

Bailey said he feared the combination of darkness and haze could be treacherous, causing him to lose sight of the horizon, lose his bearings, maybe even lose control of his plane. Visibility was four to five miles in Fairfield due to haze - at the margin for flying by visual rules, as opposed to instruments.

Kennedy, his wife and sister-in-law were soon airbound. The Federal Aviation Administration tower in Fairfield cleared him for takeoff minutes after sunset, at 8:38 p.m. EDT, and he was flying smoothly out of northern New Jersey airspace.

The plane climbed to 5,600 feet, flying east along the southern Connecticut coast, reaching Westerly, R.I., at 9:26 p.m., when Kennedy steered it out over the Atlantic Ocean, en route to the Vineyard. He was flying under visual flight rules, meaning he was not required to file a flight plan with the FAA and was navigating on his own, rather than by relying on instruments.

The sky was moonless; haze surrounding the Vineyard. He was entering the no-man's land that Barlow had warned him against - flying in instrument conditions before he was proficient. Kennedy reportedly had passed a written instrument test, but not the flying test.

Radar tracked the plane at 2,500 feet as it left Westerly. At 9:40 p.m. and 20 seconds, it was tracked at 2,200 feet, having dropped 300 feet in 14 minutes. It dropped 300 more feet in only four seconds, 300 more in the next five and 500 more in the five seconds after that.

Then it plunged into the deep.