The veteran pilot of Kobe Bryant's helicopter had tried to avoid fog so heavy that it had grounded police choppers, authorities said
A veteran pilot who plunged into a Los Angeles-area hillside, killing Kobe Bryant and eight others, had tried to avoid fog so heavy that it had grounded police choppers, authorities said.
Bryant’s death at age 41 was mourned around the world in an outpouring of shocked grief. And while the official investigation into the cause of the crash was just beginning and crews were still working to recover the bodies, experts and armchair pilots alike already were flooding social media and the airwaves with speculation.The chartered Sikorsky S-76B was a luxury twin-engine aircraft often used by Bryant in traffic-jumping hops around the L.A. area’s notoriously congested sprawl.
Some experts raised questions of whether the helicopter should have even been flying. The weather was so foggy that the Los Angeles Police Department and the county sheriff's department had grounded their own choppers.However, “a lot of times somebody who’s doing it for a living is pressured to get their client to where they have to go,” Waldman said. “They take chances that maybe they shouldn’t take.
About four minutes later, “the pilot advised they were climbing to avoid a cloud layer," Jennifer Homendy of the National Transportation Safety Board said Monday.“When ATC asked what the pilot planned to do, there was no reply,” Homendy said. “Radar data indicates the helicopter climbed to 2,300 feet and then began a left descending turn.”
The helicopter's rapid climb and fast descent suggest the pilot was disoriented, said Jerry Kidrick, a retired Army colonel who flew helicopters in Iraq and now teaches at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. On Monday, NTSB investigators scoured the area to collect evidence and Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies on horseback patrolled the brushy Calabasas hillside. Homendy said the NTSB expected to be on the scene for five days.
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