Here's What We Know About Kobe's Last Flight - LAist

Investigators work at the scene of the helicopter crash, where former NBA star Kobe Bryant and eight others died, including his 13-year-old daughter Gianna. (David McNew/Getty Images)

It could be months before federal safety investigators determine what caused the Sunday morning helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and the eight others aboard. L.A. County coroner's officials said Tuesday that they had recovered all nine bodies from a crash scene that investigators called "devastating."

Here's what we know about the flight so far:

FLIGHT PATTERN

The helicopter left John Wayne Airport in Orange County shortly after 9 a.m. en route to a youth basketball tournament in Thousand Oaks. It traveled up the I-5 corridor before circling around the Burbank airport several times, waiting for air traffic controllers to clear it.

Once cleared, it continued northwest through the Van Nuys airspace and then west to follow the 101 corridor, crashing into a Calabasas hillside around 9:45 a.m.

The website Flightradar24 has an interactive map showing the flight's path.

You can see the flight pattern in motion here >>

'SPECIAL VISUAL FLIGHT RULES'

The pilot, who has been identified Ara Zoboyan, was given permission to fly through Burbank and Van Nuys' airspace, under what is known as "special visual flight rules," a kind of clearance for flying in low visibility. John Cox, an aviation safety expert, told LAist special visual flight rules are requested by helicopter pilots pretty routinely because they can fly slower and closer to the ground.

But it does indicate that the visibility was poor, so poor that the LAPD grounded its helicopters Sunday morning, spokesman Josh Rubenstein said.

'FLIGHT FOLLOWING'

After the pilot left the Van Nuys airspace, he asked an air traffic controller for what's known as "flight following." This means navigation help from the control tower to help cope with the low visibility. An air traffic controller told the pilot that the helicopter was flying too low to register on the radar and therefore too low to offer flight following.

LAST COMMUNICATION

According to investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, the pilot told air traffic controllers that he was climbing to avoid a cloud layer shortly before the helicopter crashed into a hillside in Calabasas.

THE HELICOPTER

This Feb. 1, 2018, photo shows the Sikorsky S-76B helicopter (N72EX) at Van Nuys Airport. The helicopter's exterior was later repainted. (Matt Hartman/AP)

The helicopter was a Sikorsky 76-B, a luxury helicopter popular with VIPs but also used for search and rescue and utility missions, like transporting people to oil rigs. The NTSB has recorded 53 accidents since 1979 involving Sikorsky S-76 helicopters, 12 of them fatal. Aircraft experts say the model is considered very safe.

"It's a real workhorse of a helicopter," Peter Goelz, former managing director of the NTSB, told KPCC's AirTalk. "It has a pretty good safety record."

The helicopter was owned by a company called Island Express Holding Corp. and news outlets have reported that Bryant used the copter — and Zobayan as a pilot — on many occasions.

WHAT WE WANT TO KNOW

How big a factor was the bad weather? That's something investigators are looking into, but they say weather is just a part of an investigation looking at "man, machine and the environment."

Tom Anthony, director of the USC Aviation Safety and Security Program, says pilots can get disoriented in heavy fog.

"When you're in a cloud, you can lose spatial orientation," Anthony said. "Low clouds, low ceilings and lack of visibility, mountain obscuration, are all adverse weather conditions for flight."

We'll be listening to the NTSB's news conference this afternoon for further details on the crash.

Jill Replogle contributed to this report

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