AGAIN, THE KENNEDYS SUFFER AS THE . . . CURSE STRIKES; JFK JR., HIS WIFE MISSING AT SEA.

Byline: Mitchell Zuckoff and Matthew Brelis The Boston Globe

John F. Kennedy Jr., who crawled out from under his father's Oval Office desk into a life of tragedy-tinged celebrity, was presumed dead Saturday along with his wife and her sister when the small plane he was piloting apparently crashed off Martha's Vineyard.

Hope that the free-spirited member of the nation's most chronicled political family had simply made an unscheduled landing dimmed at midday, when wreckage and luggage were found 30 yards off Philbin Beach at the westernmost end of the island. A short walk down the beach is the Vineyard home that Kennedy and his sister inherited from their mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

As darkness fell, no bodies had been found despite an intensive search involving the Coast Guard, Air Force, Air National Guard, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Civil Air Patrol, and scores of private vessels. Late Saturday night, the National Transportation Safety Board said it will conduct an investigation of the aircraft's disappearance.

Investigators said it was too early to speculate on the cause of the crash, but preliminary efforts are focusing on Kennedy's becoming disoriented because of poor visibility and losing control of the plane, fuel mismanagement or loss of control after doing a flyby of the family property.

Kennedy, 38, a onetime Manhattan prosecutor who left the law to become publisher of George magazine, was accompanied by his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her older sister, Lauren Bessette. They were aboard his single-engine Piper Saratoga II HP, a plane the novice pilot had purchased just 10 weeks ago.

Kennedy and his wife planned to drop off her sister on Martha's Vineyard, then head to Hyannis for the wedding of a cousin, Rory Kennedy, the youngest child of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. The wedding scheduled for Saturday was postponed, and plans for a celebratory Mass were replaced by the familiar and familial sound of mournful prayers.

The entourage had set out at 8:38 p.m. Friday from Essex County Airport in Fairfield, N.J., and was expected to land at Martha's Vineyard Airport by 10 p.m. Kennedy was not required to file a flight plan and had not done so.

Kennedy, who received his solo pilot license last year, took off into a hazy, moonless sky from the New Jersey airport, and some pilots questioned whether he was experienced enough to fly under such conditions. Kennedy was not certified to fly solely via instruments and would have had to rely on visual cues.

Kyle Bailey, an experienced private pilot who also had planned to fly from New Jersey to Martha's Vineyard on Friday night, changed his mind when he saw the sky. ``I felt it was too hazy and I didn't want to chance it over open water,'' said Bailey, who said he saw the Kennedy group at the airport.

He said Kennedy, clad in a T-shirt and a baseball cap turned backward, arrived in a white convertible.

Limped to plane

Bailey said he noticed Kennedy was limping around the plane during his preflight check; Kennedy had hurt himself several weeks ago in a paragliding accident. Kennedy arrived at the airport around 8 p.m.; his wife arrived shortly after, dressed all in black. The Kennedys and Bessette left without delay.

Once airborne, Kennedy made no voice contact with the Martha's Vineyard Airport, but his six-seat, red-and-white plane was last spotted on radar at 9:39 p.m. on what appeared to be a final approach to the landing strip.

A review of radar records showed the plane was 17 miles west/southwest of the airport at an altitude of 2,200 feet. On the next radar pass, 12 seconds later, the plane had dropped to 1,300 feet. Twelve seconds later, the plane was nowhere to be seen, sources with the Federal Aviation Administration said.

The precipitous drop in altitude apparently did not trigger action by flight controllers because, without a flight plan and with no voice contact, they had no reason to pay the aircraft any heed and might not have even noticed the drop, according to FAA officials and authorities on flight procedures.

While family and friends held vigil at the Kennedys' Hyannis Port compound, the presumed death of the man known to the world as ``John-John'' added a sad new chapter to a family history in which glory and sorrow alternate like day and night.

The victories have come mainly from voters and shrewd investments, while the losses have come from even more capricious sources, including assassins, drugs and the trees of Aspen, Colo. Even before Friday's apparent plane crash, the family has suffered air tragedies before: Kennedy's uncle, Navy Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., died in 1944 when his bomber exploded over England; his aunt, Kathleen (Kennedy) Harrington, was killed in 1948 when the plane she was aboard crashed in France.

Fears about John F. Kennedy Jr., his 33-year-old wife and her sister began in earnest sometime after midnight.

At 2:15 a.m., a friend of the Kennedys called the Coast Guard station in Woods Hole to say they were late. Woods Hole called the Coast Guard's Boston station, which in turn called the FAA. The Air Force and the FAA, which also received a call from the Kennedy family, then began calling other airports to see if the plane had landed somewhere else or perhaps never took off.

Around the same time, a satellite picked up an emergency beacon signal off Montauk, N.Y. No immediate action was taken because it is standard procedure to wait for additional beacon ``hits'' to pinpoint the location of a downed airplane, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Todd Burgun.

After a second beacon signal was received, a ``case'' was opened at 3:28 a.m. by the Air Force's Air Rescue Coordination Center outside Washington, D.C., which oversees searches for missing aircraft. However, it was not known whether the signal had come from Kennedy's plane because the beacon did not have a ``signature'' to indicate its source.

At 4:30 a.m., a 41-foot Coast Guard utility vessel began searching the area off Montauk, followed by another utility boat and several larger vessels before dawn. They found nothing. At dawn, the Civil Air Patrol of the Air Force joined the search with 15 single-engine planes, focusing almost exclusively along the Long Island coastline.

Also in the sky throughout the day were two Coast Guard H60 Jayhawk helicopters, a Coast Guard Falcon jet and a huge C-130 from the Air National Guard, which provided in-flight air traffic control of the search planes. The same plane was involved in the aftermath of the crash of TWA flight 800, which plunged into nearby waters three years ago to the day.

For nearly 10 hours, the search centered on a nearly 1,000-square-mile area between the two airports, much of it around Montauk, Coast Guard officials said.

Asked whether a rescue effort might have been more effective if begun sooner, Air Force Lt. Col. Steve Roark said, ``I don't think so, because it was nighttime and because of our standard search procedures.''

Asked how long the search would continue, Coast Guard Cmdr. Mike Lapinski said: ``A lot of things come into play. The Coast Guard is searching for survivors, and any indications there might have been a chance of getting out and surviving and potentially being in the water would lead them to continue. The more signs there are, the longer we search.''

No special search

Coast Guard Rear Adm. Richard Larrabee said Kennedy's celebrity status had no bearing on the intensity of the search. ``Our efforts are consistent with the way we would search for anyone who was lost,'' he said.

Shortly before 1 p.m., the search shifted almost exclusively to the waters off Martha's Vineyard after beachgoers found items linked to Kennedy's plane.

Erin McCarthy, 31, of Boston was sitting on the beach with her friends when she spotted something in the water a short distance from the shore. Thinking it might be debris from the crash, her friend Damon Seligson, 30, a Boston lawyer, swam out to retrieve it.

It was a black canvas bag packed with clothes, a bathing suit, cosmetics and a hair dryer. The bag had an ID tag with Lauren Bessette's business cards from Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in New York.

``It was a terrible sinking feeling,'' said Seligson. ``I felt my heart burst out of my chest. It was just terrible.''

Gordon Campbell, 34, a private pilot from Greenwich, Conn., said he saw the nose wheel and a part called a wheel pant from a single-engine plane washed up on the beach. A short time later, searchers turned up a headrest and part of a plane support called a strut, said Coast Guard Lieutenant Craig Jaramillo.

Later, authorities said they also had recovered an airplane seat, a rubber cover for an airplane foot pedal and a bottle of prescription drugs belonging to Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.

The plane Kennedy was flying was built in June 1995. He purchased it used from Munir Hussain, a 39-year-old native of Pakistan who runs a furniture factory in New Jersey. Hussain sold it through a broker and said he believed Kennedy paid about $300,000.

Hussain said he was at the Essex County Airport on Friday night and noticed the plane was out of its hangar. He said he immediately became worried when he was told Kennedy was solo at the controls.

``It was a risky situation for him to be flying without an instructor because he was not instrument-rated to fly on his own,'' Hussain said. ``I know that John was a very good pilot. Everyone knew that. But I immediately began to worry because the conditions were not that good.''

Hussain said he had just landed his own plane at the airport and believed that the visibility was not ideal, around 6 miles. While it was still clear enough to take off without instruments, he felt that it was ``too risky'' for someone without instrument certification to do so.

An FAA source said Kennedy had completed just 46 hours of flight time since obtaining his solo license in April 1998.

A high-ranking federal transportation official said the National Transportation Safety Board had pulled the maintenance records of the plane and found it to be well cared for.

Apparently Kennedy did not fill his tanks prior to departure, but records obtained by the safety board indicate there were at least 90 gallons on board, plenty of fuel for a single-engine plane to make that trip. However, the plane has two fuel tanks, one in each wing, and a pilot must remember to switch from one to the other before fuel runs out.

Noting the proximity of the wreckage to Jacqueline Onassis' former Vineyard home, the official speculated that Kennedy may have been buzzing the property that he and his sister now own and was caught in a thermal updraft by the Gay Head cliffs.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

PHOTO (1--Color) Beachgoers watch as a U.S. Coast Guard rescue helicopter searches for the aircraft wreckage.

The Boston Globe

(2--Color) Massachusetts state troopers patrol Philbin Beach, where debris from the Kennedy plane was found.

Evan Richman/The Boston Globe

(3) LAUREN BESSETTE