The weather 55 miles south in Orange County, where the helicopter had departed less than an hour earlier, had been fine — 4 miles visibility. Bryant had made the same flight from near his home on the coast to the Camarillo airport, north of Los Angeles near Bryant’s basketball academy, many times.
Flying Into Patchy Fog, Kobe Bryant's Pilot Had a Decision to Make
CALABASAS, Calif. — The helicopter carrying basketball legend Kobe Bryant on Sunday morning circled over a golf course in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, awaiting clearance from air traffic controllers to continue its flight into the hills.
But now, up ahead, a fog so thick that even drivers on the freeway could barely see enveloped the hillsides near their destination. Visibility was so poor that the Los Angeles Police Department had grounded its fleet of helicopters. The pilot had a decision to make, one that might have proved fatal.
Turn around? Begin flying on instruments and head to a safe airport? The pilot, who by all accounts had a sterling safety record and was licensed to fly in inclement weather, kept going.
Sometime after its last contact with air traffic controllers at 9:45 a.m., the aircraft slammed into a hillside at 1,085 feet.
On Monday, investigators were trying to figure out what went wrong, and emphasized that no possibility, including a mechanical problem, had been ruled out.
“We take a broad look at everything around an investigation, around an accident,” Jennifer Homendy, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a news conference Monday afternoon. “We look at man, machine and the environment, and weather is just a small portion of that.”
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The helicopter was not carrying a cockpit voice recorder, and investigators have been searching a debris field of about 500 to 600 feet, trying to recover perishable evidence, Homendy said. Federal officials are not expected to reach a conclusion about the cause of the accident for months.
Asked Monday whether the crash had been survivable, Homendy replied: “It was a pretty devastating accident scene.”
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Like many celebrities and business tycoons, Bryant had long moved around Southern California by helicopter to avoid the region’s famous traffic. During his career with the Los Angeles Lakers, he would often fly into busy downtown Los Angeles for games.
On the day of the crash he was flying to a special event, a basketball tournament he was coaching at the training camp he had co-founded in Calabasas. On board with him was his daughter, a star player who many had predicted had a future in the WNBA.
In addition to his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, the crash also killed two of her teammates; an assistant coach; three other parents, one of whom was a college baseball coach; and the helicopter’s pilot.
The Sunday morning flight out of Orange County, close to Bryant’s home on the coast near Newport Beach, appeared to be uneventful at first.
When the helicopter reached Burbank, where the foothills rise above the Los Angeles basin, controllers kept the flight circling for 12 minutes, clearing other traffic, according to the NTSB. They then issued a special visual clearance for Bryant’s flight to pass through their airspace under less-than-optimal visual conditions — with the assumption, a Federal Aviation Administration official said, that the pilot would maintain legal clearance from clouds, or seek clearance to fly on instruments, after that.
But there were no further communications, until witnesses called 911 at 9:47 a.m. and reported the sound of whirring blades, broken fiberglass and a massive fire on a hillside.
The fog Sunday morning near the scene of the crash was “as thick as swimming in a pool of milk,” said Scott Daehlin, 61. He was retrieving sound equipment for a Sunday service at his church in Calabasas when the sound of a helicopter coming low and loud through the thick marine layer caused him to look up.
“I couldn’t see anything, not even a silhouette,” he said Monday morning as he looked across the street where the steep mountainside rose. The grassy slope was littered in wreckage. “My first thought was, what in the world is a helicopter doing out here in this fog?”
For about 20 seconds, he said, he followed the sound of the helicopter as it swept over the church parking lot and south toward the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains. It sounded even and normal, but, he said, “it sounded too low.”
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“It sounded almost like the pilot was hovering, trying to find his way,” he said. As the son of a pilot, he added, “I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, and I was saying, ‘Get some altitude.’ ”
Just then, the helicopter went down. He heard a loud thump and the crack of what sounded like fiberglass, and all sound from the engines stopped.
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The pilot, Ara Zobayan, who had held a commercial license since 2007, had not obtained a clearance to fly under instrument flight rules, which would have allowed him to navigate with the use of his instruments, officials said.
The special clearance from air traffic controllers allowed the pilot to fly through the controlled airspace around Burbank and Van Nuys, but it did not give him “blanket clearance” to continue to Camarillo, an FAA official said.
Beyond Burbank’s airspace, he was on his own.
“A pilot is responsible for determining whether it is safe to fly in current and expected conditions, and a pilot is also responsible for determining flight visibility,” said the FAA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss details of the investigation.
Once the pilot left Burbank’s control zone, the official added, it would have been up to him to either make sure there were appropriate visual flight conditions, or transition to flying solely with the use of instruments, which would have required additional FAA clearance.
In an audio recording of the flight’s last communications, posted online, an air traffic controller can be heard asking the pilot if he had asked for “flight following,” which allows controllers to track the flight and alert pilots to any traffic hazards, under his “special” visual flight clearance. The controller, just before losing radio contact, noted that in any case the helicopter was “too low for flight following at this time.”
Zobayan, 50, had flown Bryant before and was not only certified to fly under instrument conditions but also to teach other pilots seeking to obtain their own instrument ratings. He had no accidents or enforcement actions on his record, according to the FAA.
Zobayan learned to fly from Group 3 Aviation, which is based at the Van Nuys airport, in 1998, after taking a sightseeing flight over the Grand Canyon. He later worked as an instructor at Group 3.
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Pilots who gathered at the school Monday declined to give their names but described Zobayan as an experienced and meticulous operator. They said they were perplexed by the accident.
“Super cautious, super smart,” one of the instructors said. “I can’t see him making this kind of mistake.”
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Kurt Deetz, a helicopter pilot who once flew for Island Express Helicopters, which operated the aircraft Bryant was on, described Zobayan as “a great guy” with a “big smile” who was “always laughing.”
He said Zobayan was an experienced pilot who “knew the weather patterns” of greater Los Angeles. He said that the grounding of LAPD flights does not normally mean that private pilots will cancel their flights. The Police Department, he said, is often overly cautious.
“It’s not like, oh the LAPD’s not flying, we’re not flying,” he said.
Investigators are focusing on the weather as one of the likely causes. But based on eyewitness accounts about the sound of the helicopter and its movements before the crash, investigators have not ruled out mechanical failure.
But some of those who are familiar with the type of aircraft said a mechanical breakdown was an unlikely cause.
“It would have had to be really just a one in a million stroke of bad luck to have had a mechanical problem right when getting into the clouds,” said Jeff Wise, an aviation expert and pilot who learned to fly in Southern California.
When a pilot enters fog and loses his sense of direction, “It’s a combination of disorientation and mental workload,” Wise said. “You have a small amount of time to make a very important decision.”
Wise said that pilots by nature want to finish their missions — an inclination that he called “get-there-itis” that can be heightened when flying a high-profile passenger like Bryant.
“Pilots are determined to complete their mission and that can be a dangerous mindset,” he said. “And if you’ve got Kobe Bryant in the back seat, you don’t want to disappoint.”
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Deetz, the pilot who in the past has flown Bryant around Los Angeles, said pilots never make decisions based on their passengers’ desires. “The pilot is the final authority for safe operations of the aircraft,” he said. “Nobody wants to die.”
In Calabasas, at the church where Daehlin heard the helicopter Sunday, Bob Bjerkas, the pastor, said he was leading Sunday school when he also heard the helicopter flying over — and then the loud crunch.
He said he did not know what had happened until a little later, during the main Sunday service, when he was delivering his sermon on the suffering of Job and the brevity of life. Someone from the congregation who had been looking at the newsfeed on a phone interjected, saying several people had been killed in a helicopter crash, including Kobe Bryant.
“It was a reminder that the time we have is an instant, and we need to think about what we can do to make our lives matter each day,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
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