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...that article mentions it was owned by a corporation.. But, I'd assume it was a Kobe corporation..
Built in 1991, the chopper was owned by the state of Illinois from 2007 to 2015, when it was sold for $515,161 to a user named Jim Bagge, as the Chicago Daily Herald reported. Jim Bagge is the name of an executive at Island Express Holding Corp., the helicopter operator to which Bryant’s chopper was licensed, according to business records filed with the California Secretary of State in 2012. At the time of the sale, the helicopter’s two engines had a combined 3,952 hours of airframe, according to the helicopter database Helis.
At a press conference Sunday, representatives for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that they had sent 18 personnel to the crash site outside Calabasas, California, to investigate the accident. Jennifer Homendy, an NTSB representative, said the team would look into the maintenance records, the pilot’s background, and the helicopter’s owner and operator.
So the LAPD is grounded til afternoon, Ara is supposedly an IFR instructor who could have popped this thing up to 5,000ft and filed IFR to Camarillo ezpz and instead is following freeways. If you haven't been up front on an IFR trip it is a very different but fun world if you don't hit a hillside. Complete gray surrounds you.....wouldn't like to do it in a chopper, although apparently 2EX had a 4 axis autopilot which would have made it nice.
With everybody dead and nobody left to fill in the blanks it will be a bit before they figure out the why of Ara's decisions that morning.....
The blanks are slowly filling in......they had a hard start time for a game at the Mamba's place. Reasonable human factors......Kobe is flying friends and Gianna's school pals.......if you're a legend you want to look good for the friends and neighbors who may not get heli rides a lot. Kobe is friends with Ara the pilot and lets him know he wants to look good and be ON TIME to this game, the Mamba Way doesn't allow for a lot of failures. In the interim Ara is running VFR to save time but he gets held up by ATC anyway.....15 minutes or so.......if you have flown IFR in the LAX basin you know filing IFR is not to pick up speed......you get delayed for lots of things.......so now they are under the gun to look good and Ara can't file IFR right to the Mamba Park and if he goes to Camarillo they will be late.....so he wants to stay Special VFR (1 mile and clear of clouds) so he can scoot in to Thousand Oaks and the game............commercial exec pilots flying the CEO around say this pressure is the worst part of the game.........will see as more info comes in.......still a thousand reasons to end up in the ditch..........
So just to clarify, Special VFR means that he was given clearance to fly, right? Otherwise, had he not been granted the Special VFR, he would have been grounded? What circumstances are needed for a Special VFR? Like, it's an emergency type thing? Or does the pilot not need an excuse, as long as he meets the requirements for a Special?
Kobe's pilot was instrument-certified (or whatever it's called), so why would he not have done that rather than ask for Special VFR? Would it have caused too much of a delay?
Vf6cruiser, right, the "outside pressure" is exactly what I was reading on that site that does case studies on crashes. In one case, the family needed to get to a party in NV. Probably, as you said, Kobe's pilot felt that pressure from Kobe, maybe even especially since they had to waste 15 minutes circling.
Thanks to all you pilots who are helping us novices understand more about why this may have happened.
What circumstances are needed for a Special VFR? Like, it's an emergency type thing? Or does the pilot not need an excuse, as long as he meets the requirements for a Special?
Anybody here with significant rotary time? I got an hour or so but never really got into the rotary.
My question is would not the pilot have simply gone into a hover at very low air speed and then popped up until clear of fog? Or dropped down to a minimum altitude over a freeway?
He hit going fast and dropping like a rock. Why? Sounds like exactly the last thing you would do under such circumstances.
So did he have a heart attack or a stroke? A very senior pilot like this guy certainly knew how to hover. Why did he not?
Several mentioned spatial disorientation. With gray fog all around and no point of reference, the senses can mislead you. It might be very hard to trust the instruments that say you are falling when you feel like you are rising, or that say you are going straight when you feel like you are turning? Wasn't this the case with JFK Jr.?
Pilot might not have wanted to fly but Kobe did.........so they took off. Rich guy in the back can override the pilots decisions sometimes. Bahamas flight 6 months ago was a similar case (AG 139 crashed with 6 aboard at 2am).
You might already know this but apparently Kobe once owned this then he sold it to this company which he rented it from. I don't know the extent to which Kobe actually was a pilot or he had some training haven't found the answers. I did find where he said he would fly it to games which made him play better, but a post on Heavy.com
"In 2017, Lakes general manager Rob Pelinka told the Los Angeles Times that his life flashed before his eyes during a helicopter trip with Bryant. Pelinka said, “My life was flashing before my eyes. I almost had a heart attack. Kobe’s just sitting there calm and collected.” Pelinka said that Bryant had instructed the pilot to perform elaborate military-style maneuvers during their trip together."
I don't know what he is referring to "Maneuvers" maybe well with in normal operations maybe just auto rotations who knows. Kind of shows little sample of the kind of risk they took.
Quote:
Originally Posted by oceangaia
Several mentioned spatial disorientation. With gray fog all around and no point of reference, the senses can mislead you. It might be very hard to trust the instruments that say you are falling when you feel like you are rising, or that say you are going straight when you feel like you are turning? Wasn't this the case with JFK Jr.?
It's possible he was IFR rated usually when something goes wrong it starts with a sudden surprise which triggers a chain of events. Possible his attention was on a panel maybe a map trying to figure out their path then he looks out and suddenly sees the ground rising quickly yanks back on the collective. We see flight aware shows sudden rise at 1400 FPM maybe sudden collective inputs caused rotors to strike the tail boom. We know from the crash pictures it broke up in mid-air.
Several mentioned spatial disorientation. With gray fog all around and no point of reference, the senses can mislead you. It might be very hard to trust the instruments that say you are falling when you feel like you are rising, or that say you are going straight when you feel like you are turning? Wasn't this the case with JFK Jr.?
This guy is a heavy duty rotary instrument instructor. I have personal fought disorientation a couple of times for real. I don't have an IFR ticket but I have 30 or 40 hours in instrument conditions real or simulated. And I have gotten myself whacked a couple of times. I dealt with it and this guy is going to be a couple of orders of magnitude better than I at it.
So I would think a stroke more likely than spatial disorientation. He was just too senior for that.
Could end up an ad for two pilots or an automaton that can fly the airplane by itself. Some of the recent autopilots are about there.
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