Nevermind, found it:
http://tinyurl.com/mvr33j
KENNEDY'S PLANE LOST: THE HUNT; Intensive Search Is Normal, Officials Say, But Level of Interest Is Far From Common
By SUSAN SACHS
Published: Sunday, July 18, 1999
It began with a 2 A.M. phone call from a Kennedy family friend to the Coast Guard office in Woods Hole, Mass., reporting a private airplane missing. The information the caller gave was sketchy. She did not, at first, even identify the passengers.
But within three hours, the Air Force was investigating, the White House had been alerted, and a host of Cabinet members were soon to be immersed in a drama that brought many of them to their offices on a summer Saturday. By sunup, the search for the single-engine plane of John F. Kennedy Jr. had blossomed into a military-style mission, monitored by President Clinton, that scoured the waters off the Northeast coast with combat rescue planes, helicopters and boats.
Federal authorities insisted yesterday that they have treated the hunt for the Kennedy plane as they would the search for any missing aircraft.
They said the armada of boats and covey of planes, and the small army of pilots, Coast Guard officers, Air Force reservists and volunteers enlisted to operate them, would be deployed for any search and rescue effort that required them.
''We treat all searches the same -- there's no difference between a celebrity and a noncelebrity,'' said Lieut.
Col. Steve Roark, the director of the Air Force National Search and Rescue School.
What was different about this search, of course, was the intense level of interest, from the White House on down, almost from beginning.
The Air Force notified the so-called situation room at the White House at about 5 A.M., said Jake Siewart, a White House spokesman. That was about the time that investigators began to scramble to get planes in the air and boats in the water after establishing that Mr. Kennedy's plane was indeed missing in flight.
A short while later, the White House Chief of Staff, John D. Podesta, was notified. Thurgood Marshall Jr., the Cabinet secretary, was called and told to coordinate efforts with secretaries of the various agencies that could be involved. At about 7 A.M., Mr. Podesta called President Clinton, who was at Camp David with the First Lady, to inform him of the missing plane.
From that point on, according to officials, the President and his top aides became the contact points for members of the Kennedy family. Senator Edward M. Kennedy spoke with the transportation and defense secretaries. Andrew M. Cuomo, the Housing Secretary who is related by marriage to the Kennedys, spoke regularly with the White House during the day. At one point, officials said, President Clinton called Caroline Kennedy.
''The Coast Guard response has been the same as it would be for anyone, but what gets added on with somebody of this notoriety is the communications aspect,'' said Commander Thomas K. Ritchey, a Coast Guard congressional liaison who was one of many officials called in to his headquarters office in Washington yesterday to field calls and gather information.
''You're searching for J.F.K. Jr., so therefore the Kennedy family is going to immediately want to be in communication with the highest level of government,'' he added. ''So the normal working levels of the Coast Guard and the Air Force are briefing levels and levels above their heads.''
The earliest information to the authorities was limited and rough.
The woman caller, who has not been identified, told the night duty officers at the United States Coast Guard group office in Woods Hole, that a single-engine plane had left Essex County Airport in New Jersey with three people on board, but had not arrived as expected at the Duke's County airport at Martha's Vineyard.
It was not much to go on, and officers called the woman back after five minutes for more details. That was when they first learned that the occupants of the missing plane were celebrities, according to Lieut. Craig Jaramillo of the Coast Guard.
The Woods Hole officers called their commanders in Boston, who called the Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
Starting at about 3 A.M., officials began the laborious process of checking by phone whether anyone, anywhere -- in the air, in an air traffic control tower or on the ground at any one of a dozen or more small airports in the area -- had seen the Kennedy plane.
''This is the normal procedure,'' said Colonel Roark, who was filling in as director of the rescue coordination center at Langley yesterday. ''We have to try and narrow down down the search area. This happens several times a day and if we just launched airplanes without doing an investigation, we'd be burning up very scarce resources.''
The painstaking process of checking radar records from the night before and telephoning air traffic control centers finally paid off. At about 5 A.M., the Air Force investigators were provided a radar track of a plane that had followed the Kennedy plane's assumed route and time of flight. The data, they said, came from the Air Route Traffic Control Center in Ronkonkoma, N.Y.
It did not tell the fate of the plane but it did provide some clues for organizing the rescue effort. The plane's last location monitored by radar was about 17 miles southwest of Martha's Vineyard, at a point where it might have begun its normal descent.
The radar tracked the plane until it flew too low to be picked up by that radar station, officials said.
''It looked like a normal flight to me,'' said Colonel Roark, who studied the track of the plane. ''It looked like it was on its descent. I didn't see anything unusual.''
By about 7:30 A.M., the Air Force and Coast Guard had launched planes, helicopters and ships along the plane's assumed route. One of the first calls went to the 106th Rescue Wing of the New York State Air National Guard at Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton, Long Island. The unit has been involved in many high-profile military rescues, including that of the downed Air Force pilot over Yugoslavia during the NATO bombing of Kosovo.
One of its HC-130 Hercules search and rescue planes was already fueled and ready to take off for a mission to monitor a planned shuttle launch at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It was diverted, on orders from top Air Force commanders, to the search for the Kennedy plane. Later in the morning, a second HC-130 from the unit was added to help coordinate from the air all the various planes involved in the search.
''Some phone calls were made very quickly,'' said Lieut. Col. Anthony Cristiano, a spokesman for the rescue wing.
''We knew who it was,'' he added. ''But to us, a person is a person.''
The unit's HC-130 planes are usually used for long-range oceanic rescue missions because they can refuel military helicopters in flight and contain platforms that can be dropped into the water for a sea rescue. Colonel Cristiano said they have been used occasionally for civilian search operations. During the past year, he said, they were called upon to find and rescue a boater in the Atlantic Ocean who had had a heart attack.
The searchers also used an HH60-G helicopter from the rescue wing, 15 search planes from Civil Air Patrol units in New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts, numerous Coast Guard boats and eventually the sonar-equipped survey ship Rude from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which was involved in the recovery operation after the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800.
''The Coast Guard assets sounded pretty normal, although the Air Force did roll out some assets that were maybe a little unusual,'' said Drew Steketee, senior vice-president for communications at the Airline Pilots and Owners Association.
Offers of help also poured in from governors' offices, local police departments, private pilots and boaters and other Federal law enforcement agencies.
The United States Customs Service at Islip, on Long Island, sent up one of its A-STAR helicopters that are usually used to hunt drug smugglers at sea.
And the Woods Hole Coast Guard officers, as well as the Air National Guard staff on Long Island, said they fielded calls all day from psychics and other people offering help.
Photos: A Martha's Vineyard police officer scanning the waters off Gay Head for the missing plane. (Reuters); The bag to which the business card of Lauren Bessette was attached was handled by a Massachusetts state trooper. The bag was part of the debris recovered from the small plane piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. (Evan Richman/The Boston Globe via Associated Press)
I swear I had no idea, was just giving the "old familiar suggestion" a different spelling. I hope it's not too bad? (I just looked it up on the wiki)