No conclusions drawn about cause of crash

the cause of the crash, but they offer the most comprehensive account to date of Bryant’s final flight, which took off from John Wayne Airport in Orange County the morning of Jan. 26 and slammed into a hillside 39 minutes later, killing everyone on board.

NTSB investigators have interviewed virtually everyone who had some role in ferrying Bryant through Southern California’s skies, from the mechanic who maintained his favored helicopter, to the broker who arranged his travel, to Bryant’s personal assistant, Catherine Brady.

Brady told the NTSB that while Bryant’s 13-yearold daughter, Gianna, had games scheduled on the 26th for noon and 2 p.m., Bryant had asked her to move up his departure time, from 9:45 a.m. to 9 a.m., because he had wanted to watch another team play.

The morning of the 26th, a Sikorsky S-76B, operated by Island Express Helicopters, was waiting for Bryant at John Wayne Airport. Zobayan took off at 9:06 a.m., carrying Bryant, Gianna and six others: Christina Mauser; Payton and Sarah Chester; and John, Keri and Alyssa Altobelli.

At 9:44 a.m., Zobayan, who was hugging the 101 Freeway near Calabasas, informed an air traffic controller that he intended to climb above the cloud layer, Marie Moler, an NTSB aircraft performance specialist, wrote in a report released Wednesday. Zobayan began to climb and then banked left, straying from the 101, Moler wrote.

Zobayan, she said, may have “misperceived both pitch and roll angles”: While he told an air traffic controller he was climbing to 4,000 feet, he in fact was descending “rapidly while in a left turn,” the report said.

“When a pilot misperceives attitude and acceleration,” Moler wrote, “it is known as the ‘somatogravic illusion’ and can cause spatial disorientation.”

The Sikorsky slammed into a hillside at 184 mph, strewing wreckage across an area the size of a football field.

Four minutes later, the broker who arranged the flight asked Whitney Bagge, the vice president of Island Express Helicopters, to check the flight’s status, Bagge told the NTSB. She saw that a flight tracker had lost Zobayan at 9:45 a.m. As she tried to reach Zobayan over the radio, Bagge said, she “kept refreshing the tracker praying that it was just broken.”