Live Updates: Helicopter With Kobe Bryant Got Special Approval to Fly
Live Updates: Helicopter With Kobe Bryant Got Special Approval to Fly.
Bryant, 41, was travelling with his 13-year-old daughter to his youth basketball academy when they and seven other people perished in the crash. The helicopter had been given special approval to fly in foggy weather.
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The helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant and eight others who died in the crash had received special clearance to fly in the foggy weather.
Here’s what you need to know:
- The helicopter had received special approval to fly in foggy weather.
- Here’s what else we know about the crash.
- There were nine victims in all.
- The N.B.A. is reflecting on Bryant’s legacy.
- People around the world are mourning Bryant’s death.
- Bryant was a global star to many, but a local hero to Los Angeles.
- The Los Angeles County sheriff rebuked a news outlet over coverage of the death.
The helicopter had received special approval to fly in foggy weather.
The helicopter that crashed on Sunday with Kobe Bryant and eight other people on board, killing everyone, had received approval to fly even though weather conditions were worse than usual standards for flying.
The helicopter flew north from Orange County after takeoff on 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, allowing the pilot and his passengers to continue on a foggy morning in Southern California.
Whether that was the right decision is likely to be at the center of the investigation into the cause of the crash.
Later in the flight, just before losing radio contact, the pilot asked for “flight following,” which allows controllers to track the flight and be in regular contact.
The controller responded that the helicopter was “too low level for flight following at this time.”
Sergeant Yvette Tuning, who was the watch commander for the Los Angeles Police Department’s Air Support Division on the morning of the crash, said that most of the Los Angeles basin was so cloudy that flights could be conducted only under instrument rules, on Sunday morning.
L.A.P.D. helicopters do not generally fly under those conditions. The visibility was less than two and a half miles from the department’s heliport near Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, she said.
She said these conditions occur more often in the winter and early in the summer, when fog along the coast is commonplace.
Tuning said the weather this winter, as it was on Monday morning, has been fairly clear, allowing helicopters to operate normally.
“But yesterday when I came to work I immediately saw it as I came down into the valley, that it was just socked in,” Tuning said. “So I already knew we” — meaning L.A.P.D. Air Support — “weren’t going to be flying unless it burned off quick. And it did not burn off quick.”
Here’s what else we know about the crash.
The retired Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant, 41, and his daughter Gianna died in a helicopter crash near Calabasas, Calif., on Sunday, along with seven other victims.
The helicopter was flying from Orange County, Calif., where the Bryant family lives, and crashed in foggy conditions about 30 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles as it was en route to Bryant’s youth basketball academy.
The other passengers included the pilot, Ara Zobayan; the college baseball coach John Altobelli and Altobelli’s wife, Keri, and daughter Alyssa; Christina Mauser, a basketball coach; and Sarah and Payton Chester, a mother and daughter who lived in Orange County.
Sheriff Alex Villanueva of Los Angeles County said the helicopter went down in an area with “very rough terrain,” and that even emergency crews had found it dangerous trying to get there during daylight on Sunday. The debris field, he said, was roughly 100 yards in each direction.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it would look at the history of the pilot and any crew on board.
“We’ll be looking at maintenance records of the helicopter,” said Jennifer Homendy, a member of the board. “We will be looking at records of the owner and operator of the helicopter and a number of other things.”
It was not immediately clear how many passengers the helicopter was approved to transport, or whether the helicopter was overloaded.
The chief medical examiner for Los Angeles County, Dr. Jonathan R. Lucas, said it could take several days to recover the bodies from the crash site.
“We will be doing our work thoroughly, quickly and with the utmost compassion,” Lucas said. “We’re doing everything we can to confirm identifications and give closure to the families involved.”
FULL COVERAGE
Read more about Bryant’s death, including his brilliant and complicated legacy, how he shaped the Los Angeles Lakers and their future, and how the world of entertainment is remembering him through film and song.
There were nine victims in all.
The helicopter was traveling to the Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and its passengers included Bryant’s 13-year-old daughter Gianna, who played at the school.
Bryant coached her team, and Gianna, whose nickname was Gigi, was “hellbent” on playing for the University of Connecticut and in the W.N.B.A., he told The Los Angeles Times last year.
At a UConn game last year, the father and daughter sat courtside and Bryant was asked about his daughter picking up the game by SNY. “I watch the game through my daughter’s eyes,” he said.
John Altobelli, 56, a longtime baseball coach at Orange Coast College, a junior college in Costa Mesa. Calif., was also on the helicopter with his wife, Keri, and daughter Alyssa, according to a college spokesman.
“This is a tremendous loss for our campus community,” said Angelica Suarez, the president of Orange Coast College, in a statement.
Last year, Altobelli led the Pirates to the California Community College baseball state championship, their fourth state title with the coach, and he was named one of the American Baseball Coaches Association coaches of the year.
Jeff McNeil, a Mets All-Star infielder, had been coached by Altobelli, and told ESPN, “Him taking that chance on me, having me on his team, got me drafted.”
Although the California authorities have not publicly identified the victims, their relatives, friends and employers announced and grieved the deaths. The other victims are:
- Sarah and Payton Chester, a mother and daughter who lived in Orange County
- Christina Mauser, a California basketball coach who had worked with Gianna Bryant
- Ara Zobayan, a pilot
The N.B.A. is reflecting on Bryant’s legacy.
Bryant was drafted to the N.B.A. directly out of high school in 1996, helped lead the Los Angeles Lakers to five championships, and was named an All-Star in 18 of his 20 seasons for the team. His hypercompetitive nature could lead to drama among coaches and teammates — which sometimes spilled over into public — but his commitment to winning was never questioned.
Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, hailed Bryant as “one of the most extraordinary players in the history of our game.”
“For 20 seasons, Kobe showed us what is possible when remarkable talent blends with an absolute devotion to winning,” Silver said, adding that Bryant would “be remembered most for inspiring people around the world to pick up a basketball and compete to the very best of their ability.”
Bryant’s tenacity and intensity won him respect from rivals and inspired those who followed him into the game. Tributes from other athletes rolled in on Sunday, as Bryant’s friends and rivals shared what he meant to them. His former teammate, Shaquille O’Neal, said he would hug Bryant’s children “like they were my own.”
Michael Jordan said in a statement that he spoke to Bryant often and that he was “like a little brother to me.” Dwyane Wade, the former Miami Heat star, said on Instagram that Bryant “was who I chased” and that it was “one of the saddest days in my lifetime.”
Bryant’s résumé included the N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Player Award for the 2007-8 season, the finals M.V.P. in both 2009 and 2010, an 81-point game in 2006 that is the second-highest single-game total in N.B.A. history and a sterling pedigree on the international stage, where he won gold medals for U.S.A. Basketball in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics.
In 2016, after various injuries had taken their toll on the longtime superstar, he ended his career by scoring 60 points in his final game.
Off the court, Bryant’s legacy was far more complicated. He was arrested in 2003 after a sexual assault complaint was filed against him in Colorado. A 19-year-old hotel employee claimed that Bryant, who was working to rehabilitate his knee following surgery, had raped her. The legal case against Bryant was eventually dropped, and a civil suit was settled privately out of court, but Bryant publicly apologized for the incident.
“Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did,” he said in his statement. “After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.”
In retirement, Bryant expanded his purview, winning an Academy Award in 2018 for his animated short film “Dear Basketball” while also creating the web series “Detail” for ESPN in which he analyzed current players. He was scheduled to headline the 2020 N.B.A. Hall of Fame nominees.
People around the world are mourning Bryant’s death.
Three American presidents and athletes, celebrities and fans around the world grieved for Bryant, who became a superstar as basketball grew into an international sensation.
President Trump said that Bryant was “just getting started in life,” even after a career that forever marked him as one of basketball’s greats.
“He loved his family so much, and had such strong passion for the future,” the president wrote on Twitter. “The loss of his beautiful daughter, Gianna, makes this moment even more devastating.”
Former President Barack Obama, who once welcomed the Lakers to the White House, posted on Twitter that Bryant was “a legend on the court and just getting started in what would have been just as meaningful a second act.”
The death of Bryant’s daughter, the former president added, “is even more heartbreaking to us as parents.”
Former President Bill Clinton, who was in the White House when Bryant ascended to the N.B.A., and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, extolled how Bryant “brought excitement and joy to basketball fans not just in Los Angeles, but all over the U.S. and around the world.”
The Brazilian soccer star Neymar Jr. paid tribute to Bryant, as did the tennis player Naomi Osaka, who thanked him “for caring and checking up on me after my hard losses.”
Colin Kaepernick, the former N.F.L. quarterback whose kneeling during the national anthem in protest of racism and police brutality inspired a number of athletes to speak out publicly, said on Twitter that he would remember Bryant as a “basketball legend, a father & a man.”
The Italian Basketball Federation said on Monday that it would hold a moment of silence in every game this week for Bryant, who lived in Italy from ages 6 to 13 while his father played professional basketball there.
Bryant was fluent in Italian, and once said it would be a “dream” to play for the country, but in 2011, when an Italian team, Virtus Bologna, offered him a one-year contract during the N.B.A. lockout, the deal fell through, The Associated Press reported.
“It’s a small but heartfelt and deserved gesture to honor the life and memory of Kobe Bryant, an absolute champion who always had Italy in his heart,” the federation said in a statement. Bryant, the statement said, “was and will always be linked to our country.”
Bryant was a global star to many, but a local hero to Los Angeles.
Los Angeles woke up Monday grappling with the loss of a global superstar who was, to Southern California, still a local hero. On Sunday, spontaneous shrines and vigils cropped up around the region, including outside Staples Center, the home of the Lakers, the team he played with for 20 seasons.
“He was not a perfect man, but we all have our faults,” Joe Rivas, a 28-year-old registered nurse, said on Sunday. “It’s beyond basketball.”
Los Angeles County officials have been worried by the number of people who tried to visit the crash site, which they said is located amid challenging terrain.
“We’re now faced with, I guess, well-wishers and people mourning who have descended on the area, on the residential community and even the crash site itself,” Sheriff Alex Villanueva said on Sunday evening. “We have to reiterate that it is off-limits to everybody except the first responders and investigators.”
Mourners, he said, could gather at a nearby park.
Tuesday promises to be a challenging day in Los Angeles, where the Lakers will play their first game since Bryant’s death. Their opponent? The Los Angeles Clippers.
The Los Angeles County sheriff rebuked a news outlet over coverage of the death.
Hundreds of Bryant fans gathered near the site of the helicopter crash to mourn his death on Sunday afternoon, after it had been reported for hours by major news outlets and circulated widely on social media.
But around 5 p.m., when it came time for the sheriff of Los Angeles County, Alex Villanueva, to give an official update on an investigation, he declined to say whether Bryant was one of the victims, saying the victims’ families should be notified first.
And he offered a pointed rebuke to the news organization that broke the news. “It would be extremely disrespectful to understand your loved one has perished and you learn about it from TMZ,” he said. “That is just wholly inappropriate so we are not going to be going there. We are going to wait until the coroner does their job.”
TMZ did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The news media also drew criticism on Sunday after inaccurate reports circulated that four of Bryant’s children were killed in the crash, and a reporter for ABC News apologized for the report.
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