Dramatic recording could help answer why NBC4 helicopter crashed

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Set us as preferred It was a night of devastation in Chatsworth that began with a deadly Metro bus collision and ended with the fiery crash of an NBC4 helicopter that left two journalists and, on the ground, a bystander dead.Tuesday’s scene was a mixture of confusion and chaos with first responders fanned out across two catastrophes and television news teams desperately trying to find out whether their journalists were safe.The tragedies claimed the lives of five people and left others with various degrees of injury.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday were trying to determine exactly what caused the news helicopter, a Eurocopter AS350 B2, to go down.NTSB Investigator Fabian Salazar said officials are searching through the wreckage, combing through maintenance logbooks, security footage, weather reports, witness interviews and reviewing the pilot’s training to figure out what went wrong.But the most critical information so far has been audio captured from the helicopter during a live broadcast of reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw’s final moments before it crashed.

The footage shows an aerial view of the bus crash with the whirl of the helicopter in the background.Suddenly, the sound of the engine’s motor winds down and a horn blares, possibly warning the pilot that the main rotor speed had dropped too low or the helicopter had lost hydraulics.

Moreno responds to the noise with a quiet “uh oh.” The angle of the camera begins to descend and Moreno is heard asking “You can’t pull up?” before the video cuts out.Moreno, Marciniw and 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, who was on the ground when the chopper went down around 7 p.m., were killed.“That video is probably the most important piece of evidence we have recovered ...