A television news helicopter came down in a Chatsworth parking lot just before 7 p.m. on Tuesday and burned. Three people were pronounced dead at the scene.
It crashed less than a quarter of a mile from the fatal traffic collision it had been sent to film.
Update, September 16: what has changed, including something we got wrong
Four things have hardened since last night, and one of them corrects this report.
The aircraft was NewsChopper4, flying aerial coverage for NBC4 Los Angeles and Telemundo 52. KNBC confirmed it on air at about 9 p.m.
The station said it lost contact with its reporter and its pilot — two people. Officials, though, have been more careful: as of Wednesday morning the LAFD had still not confirmed how many people were aboard, and ABC7 reported it remained unclear whether the other two dead were in the aircraft at all.
What is confirmed is that one of the dead was not. Fire Captain Branden Silverman said one of the three appeared to have been a pedestrian on the ground.
And the person taken to hospital was a bystander having a panic attack. ABC7 reported that the individual hospitalised nearby was treated for an apparent panic attack — not for injuries from the crash. LAFD Battalion Chief Rico A. Gross had earlier put the transport count at two.
We wrote last night as though the casualties were all aboard the aircraft. That was wrong, and this is the correction. Somebody who was not covering the news, not travelling on the bus, and not connected to any of this was standing in an industrial yard in Chatsworth on a Tuesday evening and was killed by a falling helicopter.
Mayor Karen Bass, speaking near the scene:
"We lost five Angelenos today."
Two on Nordhoff Street. Three on Mason Avenue. That is the correct way to count this.
The name on the door was not the name on the aircraft
Here is the structural fact that will get one clause in most coverage and deserves more.
NewsChopper4 carried NBC4's branding. NBC4 did not own it and did not fly it. The helicopter was operated by Angel City Air, which describes itself as "a full-service aerial production company." The stations contract their aerial coverage out. Angel City Air did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is how nearly all of local television news flies. Stations rarely hold the aircraft, the certificate or the pilots; they buy the feed from a vendor, and in many markets a single operator flies for several competing stations at once. The reporter in the back may be station staff. The pilot generally is not.
That matters for three reasons, none of them accusations:
- Responsibility for airworthiness, maintenance and flight operations sits with the operator, not the newsroom whose logo is on the tail — so that is where the NTSB will look.
- The commercial pressure and the aviation decision sit in different companies. A newsroom wants the shot; an operator's pilot decides whether to fly and how. Whether that separation works as a safety feature or fails as a gap is exactly the sort of thing an investigation examines.
- When people speak, as they will, about NBC4's loss, one of the two people aboard was almost certainly not an NBC4 employee at all. He worked for a contractor, and he is no less dead.
The final minutes, and why we are not drawing conclusions from them
Two accounts of the descent exist. Both are worth reporting. Neither is a cause.
The Desk, a broadcast industry publication, says its journalists reviewed footage from the helicopter's on-board camera, which was transmitting live back to the station. Their account: audible cockpit warning alerts sounded before the aircraft veered downward. The impact itself is not on the recording.
A witness driving nearby told NBC Los Angeles:
"I happened to look over my shoulder and I saw a certain news helicopter, oddly, just coming straight down. I looked at it and I go, 'That's weird. No helicopter comes down like that.' And then two seconds later, the smoke."
It is tempting to put those two things together into an explanation. Resist it, and here is why.
An AS350 has many distinct audio warnings — low rotor RPM, engine out, low fuel, hydraulics, transmission chip detection, gearbox pressure. "A warning sounded" narrows nothing on its own; establishing which one, and in what order, is a chunk of the investigation, not a shortcut past it. And eyewitness descriptions of how an aircraft descended are among the least reliable evidence in aviation. People are poor at judging attitude, rate and angle from the ground under stress, and honest witnesses routinely describe descents that the wreckage later contradicts.
What can be said: there is a live video and audio record of the final minutes, transmitted off the aircraft before impact. That is unusual and valuable, and the NTSB will have it.
The aircraft
A Eurocopter/Airbus AS350 B2 Écureuil — a single-engine light helicopter that is the workhorse of electronic news gathering, air tours and police aviation across the United States.
Aviation outlets have reported the registration as N358TV. Treat that as provisional: LAFD said the wreckage was too badly burned to read a tail number at the scene, and the NTSB has published no identification.
We are not naming or picturing the dead yet
Names are circulating. So are photographs of a NewsChopper4 reporter and pilot, taken from social media.
Neither has been confirmed by the coroner, by Angel City Air, or by NBC4 — the organisation that would know first and has had the longest to say. No mainstream outlet has published a name. And as of Wednesday morning the fire department still could not say how many people were aboard.
That last point is the one that matters. A photograph of the NewsChopper4 crew is not evidence of who flew Tuesday at 7 p.m. Aerial crews rotate; pilots are supplied by a contractor; shifts change. Publishing two faces as the dead, hours before anyone official has identified them, risks telling one family their person is gone when he is not, and telling another that theirs does not count.
If the names now circulating are right, we lose nothing by waiting a few hours. If they are wrong, someone finds out something false and irreversible about a person they love, from a website. That trade only has one answer.
We will publish the names and the photographs as soon as they are formally confirmed, and not before.
What is established
At about 5 p.m., an SUV hit a Metro bus at West Nordhoff Street and De Soto Avenue, ending up lodged in the side of it. Two people were killed — one aboard the bus, one ejected from a vehicle — and six more were taken to hospital.
As happens in Los Angeles, the aircraft arrived. Sky5 reporter Gil Leyvas said multiple police and news helicopters, KTLA's among them, were over that intersection.
Just before 7 p.m., one of them went down in the 9100 block of North Mason Avenue, between two commercial buildings. A witness said it became a fireball the instant it hit the parking lot. Fifty-six firefighters responded. The fire took four vehicles and two storage containers with it, and touched no buildings.
Three died there. Two more were taken to hospital.
How the identification actually went — a note on reading breaking news
We wrote the section below on Tuesday night, when the operator was unconfirmed and several accounts were already asserting a station name. It has resolved, and it is worth leaving the reasoning visible rather than quietly deleting it.
On Tuesday evening the LAFD could not tell you itself. Public information officer Brandon Silverman:
"From the helicopter itself, it's pretty well destroyed. So we are going to have to go through the rubble and see how many victims there were on board, as well as identify the helicopter — we couldn't even see a tail."
At that point, the number aboard was genuinely unknown. KTLA had reported four victims pulled from the aircraft; we flagged that as consistent but unconfirmed. It turned out to be wrong — two were aboard, and the other casualties were on the ground.
The station name, meanwhile, turned out to be right. KNBC confirmed NewsChopper4 at about 9 p.m.
Both of those outcomes came from the same hour of reporting, which is the point. The early claim that was loudest was correct; the early claim that sounded most official was not. There was a decent human reason the confirmation took two hours and it was never evasion — families get told first — and a newsroom that had to put its own anchor on air to say it had lost contact with its own people did that job about as well as it can be done.
Colleen Williams, on KNBC at about 9 p.m.:
"We knew it was a news chopper, we knew we'd lost contact with our people out there, and we've just received the confirmation that, in fact, News Chopper 4 went down just before 7 o'clock tonight in Chatsworth… We're going to take a couple of minutes to think about that, to process and to regroup."
The part almost nobody will report tonight
Strip away the specifics and this is a scenario the NTSB has already formally studied, and the conclusion it reached is uncomfortable.
On July 27, 2007, two news helicopters covering the same police pursuit over Phoenix collided in mid-air. All four men aboard were killed: pilots Craig Smith and Scott Bowerbank, photographers Rick Krolak and Jim Cox. Four news helicopters and a police helicopter were working that one chase.
The Board's finding included this, as a contributing factor:
the lack of formal procedures for area electronic news gathering pilots to follow regarding the conduct of these operations.
Read that again, because it describes a structural gap rather than a mistake. When a story breaks, multiple aircraft from competing organisations converge on one point in the sky, each flying slow orbits at similar altitudes, each crew's attention partly on a camera and a live shot rather than entirely on the airspace — and there is no equivalent of air traffic control assigning them separation. They deconflict informally, by radio and by professional courtesy.
Nothing here suggests that is what happened on Mason Avenue. No cause has been offered, and it is far too early for one. A single helicopter came down; nobody has described a collision. It may turn out to be mechanical, or something else entirely, and the NTSB will take roughly 30 days for a preliminary report and likely a year or more for a probable cause.
But the context is fair to state now: Los Angeles operates the densest news helicopter fleet of any media market in the country, and Tuesday evening several of them, plus police aircraft, were stacked over one intersection in the west Valley. That is normal here. Phoenix 2007 is the reason "normal" is worth examining.
The footage is the story, and it is a strange thing to watch
The video moving around tonight was not shot by anyone chasing the helicopter crash. It was live aerial coverage of the bus crash — the routine thing, the wreck at the intersection, firefighters working to free someone from an SUV embedded in a Metro bus.
And then, in frame, people on the ground start running. Police cruisers pull out. Fire apparatus turns and accelerates away from the scene it had been working. The camera holds, and a column of black smoke is rising a quarter mile off.
Coverage of one fatal crash became coverage of the next, in real time, from the air, filmed by the colleagues of the people who had just gone down.
One historical note
We published this on Tuesday night conditional on the operator being confirmed. It has been.
On August 1, 1977, a KNBC news helicopter — the station's "Telecopter," a Bell 206B — ran out of fuel returning from covering a Santa Barbara County brush fire and crashed in the Sepulveda Basin, about eight miles from Chatsworth. It killed the cameraman, George Spears, and the pilot.
The pilot was Francis Gary Powers.
The U-2 he was flying was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960; he survived that, survived a Soviet prison, came home in a prisoner exchange on a Berlin bridge — and died seventeen years later flying a television news helicopter over the San Fernando Valley.
It is a coincidence of geography and profession, not a pattern, and it proves nothing about Tuesday. It is simply true that this job, which looks from the ground like a camera in the sky, has been killing the people who do it for a very long time — and that the same station has now lost a news helicopter in the same valley twice, forty-nine years apart.
What to watch
Whether the NTSB launches a go-team. As of late Tuesday the agency said it was still deciding. Given a fatal accident with three deaths including a person on the ground, and a live video and audio record of the final minutes, a full launch would be unsurprising. Its preliminary report should follow in roughly 30 days; probable cause is likely a year or more away.
Formal identification of the dead, including the person on the ground, and the condition of the two people taken to hospital.
Angel City Air. The operator has not yet commented. Its maintenance records, its flight operations and the aircraft's history are where an investigation of this kind goes first.
Confirmation of the registration, reported as N358TV but not yet published by the NTSB.
And whether any of this touches the structural question the Board raised in 2007 about how news helicopters share the sky over a breaking story — a question that has sat unanswered because, until now, it had not had to be asked again.
This is a developing story, last updated Wednesday, September 16. No cause has been determined and none should be inferred from the on-board audio or from witness descriptions of the descent. The aircraft's registration is reported but not officially confirmed. We are not publishing the names of the dead until they are formally identified and their families notified. Where our earlier reporting was wrong — we initially wrote as though all the casualties were aboard the helicopter — we have said so above rather than amending it silently.
