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 to think about that, to process and to regroup.”
Kovacik sobbed and wiped away tears from inside a Los Angeles Police Department vehicle. He knelt behind yellow police tape as elected officials, including Mayor Karen Bass, held an evening news conference about the accidents.
“This is a very, very, very tragic day in Los Angeles,” Bass said.
The news conference was short and solemn. Reporters from other outlets remained mostly silent, asking the mayor only one question. In tragic moments like these, Bass said, Los Angeles residents do what they do best — “come together.”
When the news conference concluded, Bass approached Kovacik and gave him a long hug. Political officials and first responders expressed their condolences to him; Kovacik thanked firefighters for arriving so quickly and doing everything they could to help Moreno and Marciniw.
The cause of the crash remained unknown Wednesday.
Jeff Wald, a former news director at rival local station KTLA, said Tuesday’s accidents were so devastating for the city partly because of the familial atmosphere inside the walls of its local newsrooms.
“What happens in this business is you wind up spending holidays, weekends, late nights and early mornings with these people, your colleagues. They become your second family,” he said in a phone interview. “Whenever I would hire somebody for these types of helicopter jobs, I worried about their safety.”
In a post on X, Frank Buckley, an anchor at KTLA, paid tribute to “our friends at NBCLA on a painful evening.”
“The helicopter pilots and crews at all of our stations are vital members of our teams who are dedicated to informing the public and this is a terrible loss,” he wrote.
Elex Michaelson, a CNN anchor who formerly co-hosted the evening news broadcast on KTTV, the local Fox affiliate, wrote on X that helicopters are “essential to covering the biggest stories in the vast news market of Southern California.” (In fact, news helicopters were pioneered in Los Angeles in the late 1950s.)
“I interned at NBC4 for years in college. Their team is filled with extraordinary people and great journalists,” Michaelson wrote in part. “My heart breaks for their team and the loved ones of everyone who lost their lives.”
Tuesday’s chopper accident took place 49 years after a Bell 206 news helicopter piloted by KNBC’s Francis Gary Powers, a former U.S. Air Force officer and CIA employee, crashed near the Encino neighborhood, killing him and cameraman George Spears. The two were returning from covering a wildfire in Santa Barbara when their chopper lost fuel and came down.
Desmond Shaw, a helicopter news reporter for the CBS LA station, appeared Tuesday night from the seat of his chopper. He reflected on recent losses in his personal life, including the deaths of his parents, and said that anguish was “compounded” by news that the city itself had been struck by “a double tragedy.”
“The poor people that were caught in that bus crash today, I don’t want them to be forgotten either,” he said.
Shaw then invoked one of the core tenets of the news profession.
“We’re always saying, out of safety: Cover the news, don’t be the news,” he said. “Unfortunately, gut-wrenchingly, they were part of the news tonight.”
