Kobe Bryant helicopter crash focus of Tuesday NTSB meeting to determine probable cause
A year after Kobe Bryant and eight others died in a horrific helicopter crash, federal investigators are due to meet Tuesday to discuss the probe and formally determine probable cause.
The long-awaited National Transportation Safety Board meeting will be streamed live at 9:30 a.m. ET.
The Los Angeles Lakers legend, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, two fellow players on her elite youth basketball team, parents of the other girls, a coach and the pilot all died in the fiery wreckage of the twin-engine Sikorsky S-76B.
The pilot, Ara Zobayan, had decided to press ahead with the doomed flight the morning of Jan. 26, 2020, even though a blanket of thick fog grounded other choppers and made his route over the hilly terrain near the crash site in Calabasas, Calif., particularly treacherous.
After flying far inland to avoid the worst weather during the first half of the flight, Zobayan hit clouds as he entered Calabasas, an area known to have its own micro-climate with fog routinely funneled from the nearby Pacific Ocean through Malibu Canyon.
He told an air traffic controller he was going to ascend, implying he found a hole in the haze, and then did what helicopter pilots are trained to avoid at all costs — he flew into a blinding cloud without instrumentation.
Zobayan, 50, apparently became disoriented and may have experienced a phenomenon called “Somatogravic illusion,” also known as “elevator illusion,” where the inner ear loses its ability to discern direction, one NTSB document suggested.
“When we fly into a cloud, and everything is white, all sorts of vestibular illusions take over,” Michael Mower, executive director of Southern Utah University’s aviation program, previously told The News.
“The bottom line is, once you take away vision, the brain starts to wander. It’s quick and very scary, and if you’re not 100% ready for it, the disorientation almost always ends in tragedy,” he said.
In the case of Zobayan, the veteran pilot reportedly bragged about intentionally flying though a cloud without instrumentation before, landing a helicopter under extreme conditions in Long Beach after transporting a celebrity customer from Coachella to Burbank, Calif.
Once Zobayan dropped the customer off in Burbank, he headed back to the helicopter’s home base in Long Beach around 3 a.m. with bad weather and very little fuel, fellow Island Express pilot David Harvey told the NTSB last year, recounting the tale Zobayan allegedly told him.
“He decided he was going to go offshore where you know there’s no obstacles and descend through the cloud layer,” Harvey told investigators, describing what would have been an illegal maneuver.
“Obviously, the airport’s closed at that point. And he did that. He descended back to Long Beach and landed while he still had a little bit of fuel,” Harvey said. “I can’t imagine why he’d even do that. He had much more experience, I thought, and wherewithal than to do something like that. He was at an airport. He could have at least gotten fuel.”
