The parallels that Howard Reisman sees between himself and John F. Kennedy Jr. continue to haunt the 57-year-old software designer more than three years after Kennedy’s Piper Saratoga II piston single crashed on a dark and hazy summer night off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
As Reisman explains, his and Kennedy’s paths in aviation are closely, perhaps even eerily, tied. For instance, both men routinely flew from Barnstable Municipal Airport in Hyannis, Mass., Kennedy’s scheduled destination the night of the July 1999 accident, in which Kennedy, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, died. Both men were also low-time private pilots who had received instruction in Cessna 182s on the same flight line at Barnstable, and for a time Kennedy and Reisman even shared the same flight instructor at FlightSafety in Vero Beach, Fla. The two had met in passing at Barnstable on several occasions, Reisman said, and were actually scheduled to be classmates in the same instrument course in Vero Beach, until Kennedy at the last minute withdrew from the class.
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