The television news helicopters that circle Los Angeles have been fixtures of the city’s sky for decades, symbols of a hard-driving but close-knit media market.The crews aboard the choppers cover police chases and FBI raids, Hollywood scandals and sports celebrations, earthquakes and wildfires.The city’s TV news community was confronted with a tragedy of its own Tuesday when a helicopter used by the local NBC station crashed and burst into flames while hovering near the scene of a fatal bus collision.
The chopper crash killed the two people aboard, journalist Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw, and one person on the ground.Two people died in the bus collision.In wrenching on-air remarks and social media posts, Los Angeles news anchors and their colleagues attempted to process their grief while continuing to report on the accident.
The outpouring illustrated the tight bonds linking colleagues who found themselves at the center of the story in the nation’s second-largest broadcasting center.NBC Los Angeles’ Robert Kovacik, who joined the station 22 years ago, reported live from a commercial intersection in Chatsworth, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.Microphone in hand, he stood just feet away from the Metro bus and the SUV that had collided when his crew’s cameras panned to plumes of black smoke rising behind a nearby 7-Eleven.
He rushed to that scene.Colleen Williams, a 40-year veteran of NBC Los Angeles and one of the city’s most recognizable broadcasting personalities, confirmed on air hours later that the station’s helicopter had gone down.Hands clasped, she spoke haltingly and seemed to fight back tears.“We’ve been piecing it together here.
We knew it was a news chopper, we knew we’d lost contact with our people out there, and we’ve just received the confirmation that, in fact, NewsChopper4 went down just before 7 o’clock tonight in Chatsworth,” Williams said to the camera.“We are going to take a couple of minutes t...