A helicopter pilot’s “spatial disorientation” played a key role in the crash that killed basketball legend Kobe Bryant, his daughter and several friends last year, federal officials said on Tuesday.
The 41-year-old Los Angeles Lakers icon, 13-year-old Gianna Bryant and seven others died on a cloudy January 26 morning near the southern California coast when their Sikorsky S-76B helicopter crashed into a hillside in Calabasas, stunning sports and basketball worlds.
The accident also killed Payton Chester, 13; Sarah Chester, 45; Alyssa Altobelli, 14; Keri Altobelli, 46; John Altobelli, 56; Christina Mauser, 38; and Ara Zobayan, 50.
Zobayan was the chief pilot of Island Express Helicopters and had 8,500 hours of flying experience and about 10 years of flying experience in the area where the aircraft crashed, the National Transportation Safety Board said during a hearing describing the likely cause of the crash .
The pilot probably had an episode of “spatial disorientation”, which NTSB President Robert Sumwalt described as “the powerful and misleading sensations that can confuse a pilot conducting a visual flight that loses visual references, and what types of training can be effective to combat this effect. “
“We’ve seen this accident before, unfortunately,” said board member Michael Graham. “Helicopters continue VFR flight (visual flight rules) in weather conditions and, unfortunately, lose control of the aircraft due to spatial disorientation.”
The previous owner of the Sikorsky S-76B operated it regularly with two pilots, said the president.
Although there was no order for Island Express Helicopters to use two pilots, Sumwalt insisted that two pairs of trained eyes could have made a difference.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Sumwalt even resisted his own investigator, who downplayed the suggestion of two pilots, saying he had seen many “spatial disorientation” accidents that had a pair of airmen at the controls.
“I wouldn’t agree with that,” said Sumwalt, who had been a pilot for US Airways for a long time before joining NTSB.
“I think that two pilots would increase the level of safety. I flew with two pilots for a long time and in an airline environment, you get the redundancy that if one pilot is fighting, the other pilot would be able to sit and say, ‘Wait a minute, you are tilting 30 degrees to the left and starting a descent. ‘”
When Zobayan found the seabed that morning, the pilot appeared to be going against federal guidelines flying in the mist, the NTSB said.
The pilot should have avoided “adverse weather” and “swerved, returned to base or landed the helicopter,” said Graham.
“And unfortunately the pilot didn’t do that,” added Graham.
An Island Express Helicopters lawyer was not immediately available for comment on Tuesday.
Zobayan is also believed to have put himself under “self-induced pressure” to complete the journey, because he had a long-standing relationship with Bryant.
Investigators said there was no evidence that Bryant or anyone else in the travel group pressed Zobayan that Sunday morning to end the trip quickly.
