Dramatic recording could help answer why NBC4 helicopter crashed Los Angeles Times 3 dead after helicopter providing coverage for NBCLA, Telemundo 52 crashes in Los Angeles NBC Los Angeles A Sky Full of Hazards: Above L....
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It was a night of devastation in Chatsworth that began with a deadly Metro bus collision and ended with the fiery crash of an NBC4 helicopter covering the news that left two journalists and, on the ground, a bystander dead.
Tuesday's scene was a mixture of confusion and chaos, with first responders fanned out across two catastrophes and television news teams desperately trying to find out whether their journalists were safe. The crashes claimed the lives of five people and left others with various degrees of injury.
Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration were trying Wednesday to determine exactly what caused the news helicopter, a Eurocopter AS350 B2, to go down.
NTSB Investigator Fabian Salazar said officials are searching through the wreckage, combing through maintenance logbooks, security footage, weather reports and witness interviews, and reviewing the pilot's training to figure out what went wrong.
But the most critical information so far has been audio captured from the helicopter during a live broadcast of reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw's final moments before it crashed.
The footage shows an aerial view of the bus crash with the whirl of the helicopter in the background. Suddenly, the sound of the engine's motor winds down and a horn blares, possibly warning the pilot that the main rotor speed had dropped too low or the helicopter had lost hydraulics. Moreno responds to the noise with a quiet "uh oh."
The angle of the camera begins to descend and Moreno is heard asking "You can't pull up?" before the video cuts out. Moreno, Marciniw and 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, who was on the ground when the chopper went down around 7 p.m., were killed.
"That video is probably the most important piece of evidence we have recovered so far," Salazar said.
On Tuesday evening, KNBC reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw flew together for the last time, before their NBC4 news helicopter crashed in Chatsworth.
Aviation experts told The Times the crash might be the result of a mechanical failure with the 22-year-old aircraft, a common helicopter for news and law enforcement organizations because of its general reliability.
Zoey Tur, a veteran news helicopter pilot who operated the type of helicopter the NBC4 crew was flying, said the sound the microphone picked up was of the engine shutting down.
"First, the engine starts winding down, which in turn reduces power to the rotor blades. Then you hear the horn warning of low rotor RPM. You can even hear the blade slap slow down," Tur said.
But, Tur pointed out, the fire that resulted when the copter crashed indicated there was still fuel onboard, so the engines likely shut down for another reason.
When a helicopter's rotors stop rotating, there's a safety maneuver known as autorotation where the pilot can try to gain enough momentum and upward flow on the rotor blades to increase their rotation, which helps control the aircraft as it descends, said Jack Cress, a former helicopter pilot for the U.S. Marine Corps and a helicopter accident investigation instructor at USC's Aviation Safety and Security Program.
Reporting synthesized and verified under Nexvoro.tech editorial guidelines. Full primary records referenced via Google News US Nation & Law.
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