LA news helicopter crashed in birthplace (and, arguably, epicenter) of ‘eye-in-the-sky’ reporting

Los Angeles has been viewed from above by news helicopters for nearly seven decades. When there was a wildfire, a mudslide or O.J. Simpson fleeing the police across its ribbons of highway, an “eye in the sky” tracked it and advised millions how to keep out of harm’s way.

On Tuesday, one of those flying newsrooms crashed live on-air and burst into flames, killing three people while reporters were covering the collision of an SUV and a city bus. NBC4 Los Angeles reported that two people aboard the helicopter — Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw — were killed, and fire officials said another person, Edy Gutierrez Mejia, died on the ground. It was a horrifying addition to at least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters in the U.S. since 2000, in which 16 people have been killed.

Moreno, known widely as “Eli in the Heli,” had been an aerial journalist since 2010, mastering a demanding form of reporting that requires editing, shooting video, intimate knowledge of a city — and quick thinking.

“After working 76 hours since Sunday, I’m almost done!” she posted to Instagram on Sept. 29, 2023. “I can’t complain though because I have the best job in the world.”

It has been about getting there first

Beaming the news from the sky undeniably provides a public service as the descendant of delivery by horseback, teletype and satellite. It’s also true that the “Telecopter” was born in Los Angeles as a way to beat the competition to the scene, according to its inventor, John Silva, chief engineer for KTLA-TV when it debuted the machine in 1958. News from the air dazzled audiences — and it meant a new era of big money for local television stations.

In a 2002 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Silva recalled sitting on the freeway, frustrated over reporting on the reporters — press stories about which journalists got to major news scenes first and were thus “the hero.”

“It came to me all of a sudden. ‘How can we beat the competition?’” Silva recalled. “If we could build a news mobile unit in a helicopter we could get over it all, get there first, avoid the traffic, and get to all the stories before anybody in the competition. It’d be a wonderful thing.’”

But not an easy one. The project had to stay top secret. The helo had to be chosen and fitted in the sprawling backyard property of a news executive, out of sight of rivals. Silva had to figure out how to shave the 2,000 pounds (900 kilograms) of camera equipment down to less than 400 pounds (181 kilograms). And critically, how to beam the news from the air to a receiving dish on a mountain and ultimately to millions of Angelenos.

Airborne at one point during testing, Silva reportedly inched out on the helicopter’s right skid — with no safety belt — to investigate the cause of intense vibrations shaking the cockpit, according to a 2009 interview with Smithsonian Magazine.

At 6:30 p.m. on July 24, 1958, KTLA preempted regular programming to broadcast the view from above the City of Angels. The station raked in record amounts of advertising, with Procter & Gamble spending $250,000 to sponsor “Telecopter” coverage, the magazine reported.

“It broadened what news could do, just like the live camera on the ground,” Stan Chambers, then a KTLA news correspondent, told the same foundation. Until then, he said, “television news was not that important to a lot of decision-makers. Then the helicopter really captivated everybody.”

Silva won two Emmy awards for his invention.

It offered dazzling coverage, but tragedy, too

News from the air punctuated a giddy era of television journalism that was increasingly striving for live, real-time reports. Americans were riveted to reports on the L.A. riots in 1992 and the two-hour police chase of O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco two years later. Together, the two events did much to confirm the allure of live crisis coverage from the air.

In 1977, a KNBC news helicopter crashed when it ran out of fuel while returning to the station after covering a wildfire in Santa Barbara, killing the pilot and camera operator. Nine years later, a helicopter flying a radio traffic reporter over New York City for a live rush-hour broadcast plunged into the Hudson River, killing her and critically injuring the pilot. The reporter, WNBC Radio’s Jane Dornacker, could be heard screaming, “Hit the water!” as the helicopter went down.

And in 2007, two news helicopters covering a police chase on live television collided and crashed, killing all four people on board in a plunge that viewers saw as a jumble of spinning, broken images. The NTSB said that crash happened because two of the pilots who were pulling double duty as reporters were distracted by the chase on the ground.

Tammy Rose, a longtime journalist for more than 20 years, was at KPNX in Phoenix in 2007 when the two television helicopters collided and has survived some harrowing incidents. But, she told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday, journalists and pilots follow strict protocols to manage the risks.

In Phoenix after the crash, all five news stations agreed to share the same news helicopter. And the company she works for in Houston, Helicopters Inc., wants its pilots to stay above 500 feet so they will have some altitude to work with in case of a problem like an engine failure.

“A news helicopter is more than a flying camera,” said Rose, who reports now for ABC-13 in Houston and says her passion keeps her flying. “As a reporter aboard the aircraft, I could see the larger scene, communicate with the newsroom, gather information and report live while events were unfolding.”

‘The eyes and ears in the sky’ for two newsrooms

NBC4 reported Wednesday that Moreno and Marciniw were known as “the eyes and ears in the sky” for two newsrooms — NBCLA and Telemundo 52 — and logged hundreds of hours together since they began working together in 2023. Marciniw is believed to have had more than 30 years of flight experience and was respected in the industry, NBC4 reported.

Esteban Jimenez, a fellow helicopter pilot, told the channel that he had known Marciniw since the 1990s and that the two had talked recently about retirement.

Moreno stood in awe of the breadth of subjects the team could report — and she seemed to do everything except fly the helicopter. “I’m not just a photographer or reporter or editor, I’m actually doing all three things at the same time,” she told her alma mater, Chapman University.

In a social media posting from Whiteman Airport on July 31, she said any kind of spot news was fair game, but the brush fires that plague Southern California were critical. “It’s really one of the best stories to cover from the helicopter, because the helicopter is able to show here’s where the fire started, here’s where it’s going, these are the homes that are threatened.”

“It just goes to show the power that we have from being the eye in the sky.”

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AP Transportation Writer Josh Funk contributed from Omaha, Nebraska. Kellman reported from London.