Video of Kobe Bryant helicopter crash site shows crater, blackened wreckage
Wreckage, some blackened, covers a hillside in a video posted by federal investigators probing the helicopter crash that killed retired NBA star Kobe Bryant and eight others, including his teen daughter, on Sunday.
Drone video shows the debris field, while other footage shows National Transportation Safety Board investigators picking through the wreckage in the Santa Monica Mountains near Los Angeles.
The crash created a crater and left wreckage spread over a 500- to 600-foot area, CNN reported.
“There is (an) impact area on one of the hills and a piece of the tail is down the hill, on the left side of the hill,” said NTSB board member Jennifer Homendy, CNN reports. “The fuselage is over on the other side of that hill, and then the main rotor is about 100 yards beyond that.”
Nine people died in the crash outside of Los Angeles, including Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna.
Federal investigators are looking into what happened to the helicopter when it crashed in Calabasas. The helicopter was flying in foggy conditions when it went down, according to multiple reports.
The helicopter, a Sikorsky S-76B, left Orange County’s John Wayne Airport at 9:06 a.m., the Los Angeles Times reports.
The first call about the crash to 911 came at 9:47 a.m., ESPN reports.
The fog in the area was so bad Sunday morning that police and the sheriff’s department in the area had grounded their helicopters, according to the LA Times.
“The weather situation did not meet our minimum standards for flying,” Los Angeles police spokesman Josh Rubenstein said, according to ESPN.
The Burbank Airport control tower had authorized the helicopter’s pilot to fly under “special visual flight rules,” an air-traffic conversation shows, KTLA reported. Those rules are more stringent than visual flight rules allowed under normal conditions.
The crash happened in mountainous terrain, making it difficult for first responders to get to the scene, according to KABC. Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva called the crash site a “logistical nightmare,” the station reported.
Investigators eventually bulldozed a road to the crash site, CNN reported.
Mourners gathering at the scene have hampered investigators, leading sheriff’s officials to declare the area off-limits, according to the network.
Also killed in the crash were Gianna’s basketball teammate Alyssa Altobelli, her mother, Keri, and her father, John, a baseball coach, Christina Mauser, a school basketball assistant coach, Payton Chester, another teammate of Gianna’s, and Payton’s mother Sarah., and the pilot, Ara Zobayan, USA Today reported.