Helicopter Carrying Bryant Approved to Fly in Fog

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January 27, 2020 10:04 PM

The helicopter that crashed Sunday with retired NBA star Kobe Bryant and eight other people on board, killing everyone, had received approval to fly through the controlled airspace around Burbank even though weather conditions were worse than usual standards for flying.

Helicopter Carrying Bryant Approved to Fly in Fog

The helicopter flew north from Orange County, California, after takeoff Sunday morning and circled near Burbank, waiting for clearance to keep going. According to audio records between the helicopter’s pilot and air traffic control at Burbank Airport, the helicopter was given what is known as Special Visual Flight Rules clearance, meaning they could proceed through Burbank’s airspace on a foggy morning in Southern California.

Whether the pilot made the right decision — to continue flying on despite low fog in the hillsides of Calabasas, where the aircraft crashed — will likely be at the center of the investigation into the cause of the crash.

Any special clearance from air traffic controllers would have allowed the pilot to fly through the controlled airspace around Burbank and Van Nuys, but would not give the flight “blanket clearance” to continue on from there to Calabasas, according to a Federal Aviation Administration official.

“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 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 his instruments, which would have required an additional FAA clearance.

Officially transitioning to instrument flight rules would have allowed the pilot to go on flying, even with very low visibility, but would not have allowed the flight to land except at an airport. The pilot might also have had to gain altitude in order to be fully visible on radar used by controllers.

Just before losing radio contact, the pilot had asked for “flight following,” which allows controllers to track the flight and be in regular contact, under his “special” visual flight clearance.

The controller responded that the helicopter was “too low level for flight following at this time.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

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