A news helicopter covering a fatal Los Angeles Metro bus collision crashed in a Chatsworth parking lot Tuesday evening, killing the pilot, an aerial photojournalist, and a person on the ground. The crash happened as the aircraft was providing live coverage of the very collision it went down near.
What happened, and who died?
The helicopter, a Eurocopter AS 350 B2 operated by Angel City Air for NBC4 and Telemundo 52, went down shortly before 7 p.m. Tuesday and burst into flames on impact, with fire spreading to nearby parked vehicles. Two people aboard the aircraft were killed: pilot George Marciniw, who grew up in Southern California and graduated from Burbank High School, and Eliana Moreno, an aerial photojournalist and 2010 Chapman University graduate who’d been with the helicopter team since that same year. A third victim, a pedestrian on the ground, also died; two additional people were hospitalized. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said, “We lost five Angelenos today,” referring to the combined toll of both the bus collision and the helicopter crash.
What was the bus collision the helicopter was covering?
Earlier Tuesday, at 5:03 p.m., an SUV collided with a Los Angeles Metro bus on Nordhoff Street, killing two people and injuring several others. NewsChopper4 was providing aerial coverage of that collision when it crashed roughly two hours later, meaning the helicopter’s final assignment was reporting on a tragedy it would itself become part of within the same news cycle.
What caused the helicopter to go down?
That’s not yet known. The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation, with the Federal Aviation Administration assisting, and investigators were expected to arrive at the crash site Wednesday morning. Officials haven’t said whether the aircraft suffered a mechanical failure or what else might have caused the crash, and a cause typically isn’t determined until well into an NTSB investigation.
How has NBC responded?
NBC Los Angeles issued a statement saying, “We are deeply saddened to share that a helicopter providing aerial news coverage for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 was involved in a fatal accident in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening.” News helicopter crews are rarely in the spotlight themselves, and the deaths of Marciniw and Moreno underscore that the aerial coverage viewers see during breaking news, including the very story of the bus collision, comes with its own real risk to the people flying and filming it.
Why a helicopter was over that intersection at all
Two people died doing a job that drones now do for a fraction of the cost and none of the risk. That is not hindsight about this crash specifically, whose cause is unknown and under NTSB investigation. It is a standing question about the business.
A news helicopter costs a station millions to operate annually and requires a pilot and a photojournalist in the air. A drone covering a surface-street collision costs a tiny fraction of that and puts nobody above the scene. Most stations have added drones without retiring the aircraft, because a helicopter still does things a drone cannot: fly long distances quickly, stay up for hours, cover pursuits across a metro area, and operate legally beyond an operator’s line of sight, which drone rules sharply restrict.
So the honest answer is that the helicopter was there because a bus collision two hours into a news cycle is exactly the assignment the aircraft is kept for, and because live aerial video still drives ratings in a market like Los Angeles. Whether that calculation should survive contact with what happened Tuesday is a question the industry tends to revisit only after a crash, and then briefly. Marciniw and Moreno were not doing anything unusual. They were doing the routine version of the job.
Sources: NBC News · KTLA · NBC Los Angeles · Associated Press
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