The night before a helicopter carrying the basketball legend Kobe Bryant slammed into a fog-shrouded mountainside, a charter service manager told the pilot that the weather in Southern California could be an issue, according to text messages released on Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board.
The pilot, Ara Zobayan, texted that he had checked the forecast — “not the best day tomorrow but it is not as bad as today” — and that he would advise the charter service the next morning on the weather, the messages said.
But on the morning of the Jan. 26 flight, Mr. Zobayan wrote “weather looking OK” in a text message to Patti Taylor, operations manager of OC Helicopters, which had arranged Mr. Bryant’s charters.
The exchange was part of 1,700 pages of evidentiary materials from the N.T.S.B. that shed new light on Mr. Zobayan’s decision-making before and during the flight.
All nine people aboard the Sikorsky S-76B helicopter were killed, including Mr. Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna. A final ruling on the cause of the crash has yet to be determined by the safety board.
Moments before the crash, Mr. Zobayan told air traffic controllers that he was climbing to 4,000 feet, according to a transcript. But investigators said that the helicopter was in a steep descent and that Mr. Zobayan appeared to be disoriented.
“Calculated apparent angles at this time show that the pilot could have misperceived both pitch and roll angles,” one report said.
The flight departed John Wayne Airport in Orange County just after 9 a.m. and was headed to Camarillo Airport, near where a basketball tournament was being played at Mr. Bryant’s Mamba Sports Academy.
When Mr. Zobayan showed a flight-planning app on his phone to Richard Stewart Webb, the owner of OC Helicopters, that morning, there was low visibility to the east of the crash site, the safety board said. OC Helicopters had referred Mr. Bryant to Island Express Helicopters, the charter flight operator that employed Mr. Zobayan.
The flight had been originally scheduled to depart at 9:45 a.m., but it was moved up to 9 a.m. the night before so that Mr. Bryant could watch another basketball team play at his academy, his personal assistant told the safety board.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting.
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June 18, 2020 at 09:39AM
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Before Crash That Killed Kobe Bryant, Helicopter Service Raised Weather Concerns - The New York Times
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