Kobe Bryant helicopter accident flight path re-creation

Like most people, I was shocked and saddened to learn of Kobe Bryant's

helicopter

crash. I am a private pilot based in Los Angeles and I am quite familiar with flying in the area and I wanted to know more about flying to maybe get a better idea. What could have happened? I'm sure many feel the same way, so I downloaded the

flight

KML data from Flightradar24 and entered that data into the Google Earth studio to get a rough idea of ​​the last five minutes of the

flight

. I posted my results on YouTube to help others understand better too, so let's first go back to the aerial view to see the flight

path

that originated from Orange County John Wayne Airport, although my renders don't show the weather conditions, is important We know that there was a lot of fog with low cloud cover over the entire Los Angeles basin that day.

This flight was conducted under VFR flight rules, meaning the

helicopter

legally needed three miles of visibility and had to remain 500 feet below cloud cover as it approached. Burbank class C airspace that was reporting high if our conditions at the time the helicopter requested a lesser known request known as special VFR to be able to proceed to the Burbank tower Burbank Eltham two-30 100 Burbank West surface areas Charlie farce pay attention November 2 echo I'm staying out of Bourbon Charlie class airspace. I have a plane going around like this, special through Pharma, that the pilot will specifically request from ATC and four helicopters allow them to simply stay clear of clouds and fly with less than 1 mile of visibility. the pilot could not enter Burbank airspace until that request was approved, which meant having to stay out of the airspace for about 15 minutes until ATC could clear incoming IFR aircraft landing in Burbank.

It's going to be a bit. I got a citation on a nine-mile Final and then they turn around, what I just did is going to turn face to file in about three minutes, okay, focusing all this November colliculus to echo the X-rays and, For your planning purposes, you can expect the transition to the north side. from the airport I just talked to Van Nuys on the line and they have multiple IFR departures coming off runway one-six so you can expect to follow all five north and cross in that direction so I'm glad you're helping us out. 317 Dad Burbank Tower, can you wait a few minutes.

I have a special VFR helicopter. I need to make the transition. He's been waiting for about fifteen minutes. Oh, northwest, all five highways maintained a special VFR condition edible at 2500 should be above us or below 2500 i five north. -south request number to echo I see that I would offer that I still take the 101 for X-ray rhetorical equation Roger, we must echo the finished, remains that squawk, contact, Van Nuys helicopters, one, one, nine, zero point, reaction, a participant, which I cut there to further echo with you for the specialty of our transition, we have exchanged 1400 helicopters in lightning echo X, then I take a shower, wink. at 2 and 1/2 visibility it looked like 1100 cloudy so I thought at just three zero one six clear towards Van Nuys Delta class northeast of n eyes along highway 118 westbound linear and VFR conditions recommended or when clear the Van Eyes class shelter transition at or below the 2500 committee, so echo, I actually fly this through Fox's unofficial analyst to our country's 118 at 1400 and we have 0 to 35, actually I don't thank you and once I clear up Van Nuys del, did you want to talk to SoCal?

They provide us with reckless sour pork, a quick recovery, stocks move forward and begin to be a mild west coast for a helicopter q x-ray echo approved in, are you transitioning into VFR conditions? We have our position so one thousand and five months is to work with talk until ff3 thanks context okay now one three four point two four flight 434 to 2014 the helicopter then transitioned into Burbank and Van Nuys airspace and that's where we picked up with the X-ray view of Google Earth. So Oh x- Ray, yeah your ass on a 1200 code, are you prompted following?

It's important to note that while I pulled this data directly from the actual flight

path

, this is simply my interpretation of what it looked like at this point, the helicopter typically flies around 1200 feet MSL. and approximately 130 knots Van Nuys weather at the time showed two and a half miles of visibility with cloud cover at 1,300 feet above ground level, which would be about 2,100 feet above sea level to echo. I care what you say. X-ray echo intentions. You are still at too low a level to follow this fence. I'll speed up the footage a little here as the helicopter continues through the San Fernando Valley passing the 405 freeway, the helicopter heads southwest until it meets the 101. freeway and begins to head west and it makes sense that the terrain towards the west is mountainous and the 101 is the lowest and safest route through the mountains, the problem is that the cloud cover was low enough that day that not only were there many The mountains are obscured, but the high terrain could possibly having prevented them from crossing the pass while they remained clear of clouds.

The helicopter is flying quite low at this point, about 500 feet above the ground by my calculations, you may be wondering if it is legal to fly that low. While the FAA restricts fixed-wing aircraft from flying below 1,000 feet in a congested area, helicopters do not have that restriction due to their unique operating characteristics. Remember again that while this was drawn from actual radar data, this display is my estimate and should not be taken as fact as we approach the uptrend. I should note that the mountains around here reach as high as 2,800 feet, so if the cloud cover was 2,100 feet, there would surely be mountain obscuration in the area where it starts to drop uncomfortably.

At this point and I guess it soon became apparent that flying this route visually wasn't going to work. Here you can see the helicopter climbing to gain altitude. I guess at this point they were already in the clouds. Then the helicopter. makes an ascending turn to the left, presumably to return to lower ground, if they were actually flying in the clouds at this point it would have been quite disorienting to go from flying visually to relying on instruments alone, the helicopter then quickly loses altitude and the last The recorded target is just before impacting the mountain.

I hope this video was able to give you a better idea of ​​what may have happened, but remember again that the NTSB is the sole authority on

accident

investigations, so take this video with a grain of salt and To all fellow pilots, stay safe. Thank you.