COPTER WAS
Flight trackers struggled to follow
LOS ANGELES — While traveling too low for requested radar assistance, Kobe Bryant’s doomed helicopter encountered a “cloud layer” near Calabasas, Calif., and began an abrupt ascent, investigators said Monday.
The chopper climbed to 2,300 feet, made a “left descending turn” and crashed into a hillside at 1,085 feet, bursting into flames, National Transportation Safety Safety Board investigator Jennifer Homendy said.
“It was a pretty devastating accident scene,” Homendy said at an afternoon news conference, adding it was too soon to say if the pilot was flying “too fast.”
She said the debris field stretched some 600 feet, with a piece of the tail down the hill on one side of the impact crater, the fuselage on the other and the main rotor “about a hundred yards beyond that.”
The Sikorsky S-76 did not have a “black box,” she said, but investigators still hoped to gather data from an iPad used by the pilot and avionics recovered at the scene.
Investigative teams will look at everything from weather to the pilot’s “performance” and the helicopter’s “airworthiness” as they piece together what caused the tragedy that claimed nine lives, she said.
Air traffic control audio from LiveATC.net previously revealed the pilot, Ara Zobayan, was warned Sunday he was flying “too low” to be tracked by requested radar after leaving airspace above Van Nuys near the western edge of Los Angeles.
It was a foggy day, and Zobayan and his eight passengers had already been forced to circle for 12 minutes near Burbank Airport waiting for clearance to proceed amid conditions that didn’t meet the basic minimums of 3 miles visibility and a 1,000-foot cloud ceiling, Homendy said.
After he left the Van Nuys area, Zobayan requested “flight following” from Southern California Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON), to help him maintain separation with other aircraft, the air traffic audio confirmed.
A TRACON controller is heard repeatedly trying to make contact with the helicopter.
“Echo X-ray ident,” the controller says in the audio, using the phonetic alphabet for the ending of the chopper’s N72EX tail number.
“Echo X-ray, yeah, you’re following a 1,200 code, uh, are you requesting flight following?” the controller asks.
“2 Echo X-ray, say intentions,” the male voice asks.
“What are you … ?” the voice adds as the transmission gets garbled.
“2 Echo X-ray, you’re still too low level for flight following at this time,” the voice states.
Homendy said four minutes after TRACON advised the helicopter was “too low” for flight following, the pilot said “they were climbing to avoid a cloud layer.”
“When [air traffic control] asked what the pilot planned to do, there was no reply,” Homendy said.
One expert said it’s likely Zobayan had trouble hearing TRACON as he traveled low amid the Santa Monica