Newly-released footage gives an up-close look at the wreckage of Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crash.
The footage was released by federal investigators on Tuesday as the coroner revealed at the bodies of all nine victims had been recovered.
via NYDN:
The NTSB used a drone to take the overhead images of the estimated 600-foot debris field on a rugged hillside in Calabasas, Calif.
The video, posted on Twitter, received some negative reaction from fans who found it disrespectful, but the release was customary under the NTSB’s mandate to inform the public and prevent future accidents.
Bryant, 41, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others perished when their Sikorsky S-76B hit the steep terrain at 1,085 feet Sunday morning and burst into flames.
The coroner has not yet officially identified the occupants of the doomed chopper, but family members and colleagues confirmed their identities.
They were pilot Ara Zobayan, 50; Orange Coast College basketball coach John Altobelli, 56, his wife, Keri, 46, and their 13-year-old daughter, Alyssa, 13; Mamba Sports Academy basketball coach Christina Mauser, 38, a married mother of three; and Sarah Chester, 45, and her daughter, Payton, 13.
Both Payton and Alyssa were teammates with Gianna on a Mamba Sports Academy basketball squad.
The group in the helicopter left Orange County’s John Wayne airport at 9:06 a.m. en route to Mamba in Thousand Oaks for a game. They died when the chopper slammed into the hillside and burst into flames around 9:45 a.m. California time.
Coroner officials said personnel from the department’s Special Operations Response Team (SORT) initially recovered three bodies from the helicopter wreckage located in the 4200 block of Las Virgenes Road in Calabasas.
The next day, the search continued for the other six helicopter occupants.
Their bodies were eventually located, removed from the crash site and transported to the department’s Forensic Science Center, the officials said.
Investigators are “actively working on identifying the decedents” through forensic means and “body examinations are in progress,” they said.
If you care to, you can watch the footage below.
NTSB B-Roll taken on Jan. 27 of investigators documenting the accident site of the Jan. 26 helicopter crash in Calabasas, CA; https://t.co/apLHHAkj2z
— NTSB Newsroom (@NTSB_Newsroom) January 28, 2020
