Exclusive | How JFK Jr.s body was found under 116 feet of water just hours after end to search was being considered

JFK Jr.’s body was found 116 feet below the Atlantic Ocean — just hours after the search team began discussing calling off the massive operation, the mission’s leader told The Post.After John F.Kennedy Jr.’s plane went missing on the night of July 16, 1999, the US government embarked on one of the largest maritime searches for private citizens in the nation’s history.On the fourth day of what had been an exhausting and fruitless effort to find Kennedy, his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister, Lauren, officials began planning an exit strategy.But as they discussed ending the search, high-tech sonar scanners, almost miraculously, finally located Kennedy’s body on the ocean floor, about 10 feet from the wreckage which still held the strapped-in bodies of the sisters.They were about seven miles off the southwest coast of Martha’s Vineyard.“John F.

Kennedy Jr.was outside the aircraft, and there was a consideration that had another day passed, that in the 1.6-knot current, that he might’ve been swept away,” said Coast Guard Capt.

W.Russell “Russ” Webster, the incident commander for search operations for the JFK Jr.

mission.“They might have never found him had another day gone by,” his wife, maritime historian Theresa Mitchell Webster, recalled.The couple co-authored “The Last Flight: The Untold Story of the Search for JFK Jr.and the Race Against the Atlantic,” which describes how side-scanning sonar and a video camera located America’s Son.The following morning, five days after the crash of the Saratoga II that Kennedy, 38, was piloting in dense haze, divers recovered all three bodies.Carolyn, 33, and Lauren, 34, were identified only through their different hair colors.“The NTSB forensic anthropologist told us that the girls were not facially recognizable,” said Theresa.The trio was traveling from Caldwell, NJ, en route to Martha’s Vineyard, for Kennedy’s cousin Rory’s wedding.Kennedy had been on visual flight rules, Rus...