The pilot was identified as Ara Zobayan. Homendy said the pilot had reported 8,200 hours of flight time by July 2019. He was commercially certified as a pilot and certified as a flight instructor, she said.
Several aviation experts said it is not uncommon for helicopter pilots to be given such permission, though some thought it unusual that it would be granted in airspace as busy as that over Los Angeles.
But Kurt Deetz, who flew for Bryant dozens of times in the same chopper that went down, said permission is often granted in the area.
“It happened all the time in the winter months in LA,” Deetz said. “You get fog.”
The helicopter left Santa Ana in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, shortly after 9 a.m., heading north and then west. Bryant was believed to be headed for his youth sports academy in nearby Thousand Oaks, which was holding a basketball tournament Sunday in which Bryant’s daughter, known as Gigi, was competing.
Air traffic controllers noted poor visibility around Burbank to the north and Van Nuys to the northwest. At one point, the controllers instructed the chopper to circle because of other planes in the area before proceeding.
The aircraft crashed about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northwest of downtown Los Angeles. When it struck the ground, it was flying at about 184 mph (296 mph) and descending at a rate of more than 4,000 feet per minute, according to data from Flightradar24.
Waldman said the same thing happened to John F. Kennedy Jr. when his plane dropped out of the sky near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in 1999.
“A lot of times somebody who’s doing it for a living is pressured to get their client to where they have to go,” Waldman said. “They take chances that maybe they shouldn’t take.”
Bryant had been known since his playing days for taking helicopters instead of braving the notoriously snarled Los Angeles traffic. “I’m not going into LA without the Mamba chopper,” he joked on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in 2018, referring to his own nickname, Black Mamba.
David Hoeppner, an expert on helicopter design, said he won’t fly on helicopters.
“Part of it is the way they certify and design these things,” said Hoeppner, a retired engineering professor at the University of Utah. “But the other part is helicopter pilots often fly in conditions where they shouldn’t be flying.”
Jerry Kidrick, a retired Army colonel who flew helicopters in Iraq and now teaches at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, said the helicopter’s rapid climb and fast descent suggest the pilot was disoriented.