Commentary: News helicopters are very L.A. It's a dangerous job

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Set us as preferred They’re as far away as a couple of thousand feet over your head, and as close as your radio and cellphone.They were aloft before GPS, before Waze and Google Maps, and they still are.Where, literally, would Angelenos be without the flying eyes that guide us to our destinations through our traffic mangles and bring us close to mayhem, riot and fire?Their work became the story Tuesday when the two people in an NBC4 news helicopter died after it crashed and burst into flames in Chatsworth, not far from the story they were heading to cover: an SUV had plowed into a bus, killing two.One person on the ground also died in the helicopter crash.

Los Angeles and airborne reporting were always a match made, if not in heaven, then a quarter-mile or so closer to it than the rest of us earthbound beings.California A helicopter crashed into flames Tuesday night in Chatsworth, not far from a serious accident involving a Metro bus that left three people dead.Kelly Lange worked for several years as an airborne radio traffic reporter before becoming a groundbreaking female nightly news anchor for the NBC station here and a guest host for the NBC network.

She is a friend, and I called her Tuesday to hear her reflections on the work, and her onetime colleagues.“It’s such a dangerous job, really,” she told me and described some of her close calls.“I’m amazed I lived through it.”New York City claims the earliest aerial traffic report, in the summer of 1935, by a police commander who monitored the weekend flow of Fords from a Goodyear blimp.

Car radios were still uncommon, but one afternoon, the airborne commander spent 20 minutes chewing out a Sunday driver he saw weaving and dodging through a traffic jam in Queens.He described the car and then boomed out his order over the airwaves, “Don’t be so hasty there.

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