We are almost two weeks from the terrible helicopter that claimed the lives of Kobe and Gianna Bryant as well as seven others and new info continues to pour in.
Federal investigators now state that the doomed helicopter was merely 12 seconds from clearing thick fog when it crashed into the Calabasas hillside.
According to a preliminary report released Friday by the National Transportation Safety Board — pilot Ara Zobayan was 100 feet away from exiting heavy cloud cover when he made a left turn and crashed into the terrain at 180 mph.
“If you exit the bottom of the clouds at 4,000 feet per minute at that high speed, you’ve certainly lost control of the aircraft,” air safety consultant Kipp Lau said. “Once you break out of the clouds it’s clear. Everything lines up with the body.”
Another independent aviation expert stated that Zobayan was likely trying to attempt a maneuver to quickly clear clouds by moving the aircraft up and forward, but made a fatal error with the left turn.
“When he went into the clouds, he had a full on emergency,” pilot Mike Sagely said, noting that turning during the pop-up maneuver is “catastrophic . . . 80 to 90 percent of the time.”
The report states that a witness heard the sound of the helicopter and then heard it getting louder.
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“He judged it to be moving fast, travelling on a forward and descending trajectory,” the report says. “It started to roll to the left such that he caught a glimpse of its belly. He observed it for 1 or 2 seconds, before it impacted terrain about 50 feet below his position.”
Kobe, his daughter, as well as seven others were on their way to his Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks on Jan. 26th when the chopper crashed.
