I flew over a golf course, and you could smell the strong scent of freshly cut grass. “You would fly over Monterey Park and you’d see people in the parks doing tai chi, just moving in slow motion,” he said. Reporting from 1,000 feet in the air, he said, enabled him to create an audible tapestry of the dense, diverse, rapidly changing city his listeners were navigating below. “It’s just a very dynamic place,” said Chuck Street, executive director of the Los Angeles Helicopter Operators Association, who logged more than 25,000 hours in the air for local radio and television stations before retiring. The airspace above the city is a bustling place all its own, with helicopters at John Wayne veering away from the flight path of departing passenger jets, small planes towing advertising banners down the coast and air traffic controllers issuing clipped instructions to keep everyone in their aerial lanes. A bird’s-eye view of the city takes in schools and golf courses, dry riverbeds and warrens of self storage spaces. The city from the air is a panorama of big-box stores and ranch houses, glinting with turquoise pools and bristling with palms and Italian cypress trees. On Tuesday, a New York Times reporter retraced much of the route of the flight, taking off from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, a journey that offered the sort of sweeping views of greater Los Angeles that can be so compelling to television viewers. (Los Angeles magazine reported that the first live police chase shown on local news was in 1992, when a rerun of the legal show “Matlock” was interrupted to show the police chasing a red Volkswagen.)ĭuring one police chase, Tur recalled, more than a dozen helicopters seemed to be hovering at once, “like something out of ‘Apocalypse Now,’” she said.īryant’s last flight on Sunday took him from Orange County north to Burbank and across to Calabasas, where the helicopter went down amid thick fog. Simpson chase that riveted millions of viewers. And she was hovering overhead in 1994 during the O.J. But Tur, a pilot and reporter, was also a pioneer, capturing searing images of the beating of Reginald Denny, a truck driver, during the riots in 1992. When Zoey Tur began flying her helicopter around Los Angeles in the late 1970s, live coverage from the air was hardly a staple of television news. Choppers for us here in Los Angeles are essential for news gathering.” “We cover a market that is 100 miles to the east and many miles to the north and south. “Sometimes the chopper will get up in the air on one story and end up chasing five other stories while we’re up there,” said Pete Wilgoren, the managing editor of the Fox 11 television station. The air above Brentwood was abuzz on Wednesday as a stream of helicopters - mainly from the Fire Department, but also from TV news stations - circled a burning 25-story building. “Even now it’s part of the white noise of the city I relate to.”įor local television news stations, helicopters are a necessity to do the job, whether following a police chase or doing traffic reports. “Growing up it was always a part of the day-to-day,” he said. José Richard Avilés, who works for the city’s Department of Transportation, said he did not realize that a constant stream of helicopters was uncommon until he attended college in Minnesota. Gregory Boyle, who runs Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit group that helps former gang members escape the street life, wrote in a text message.
“Every homie has had a helicopter experience,” the Rev. Two years earlier, helicopters showed the nation, and the world, a city on fire during the riots after the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King. Simpson, showcasing the city’s fascination with freeway police chases, a phenomenon that has only heightened in the age of social media. In 1994, a news helicopter tracked the slow-moving white Bronco carrying O.J. Private, taxilike services like Blade have prospered, allowing the merely wealthy, not just the ultrawealthy, to loft above it all.Īt other tragic turns in the modern history of Los Angeles, there too was a helicopter. Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford fly their own choppers, and Brad Pitt and Madonna are also known to zoom around the city by helicopter. (David Walter Banks/The New York Times)īryant, of course, was not the only celebrity in this city filled with them to embrace the helicopter as a preferred mode of transportation. The Presbyterian-affiliated church, by topographical chance, had the only real vantage point of the wreckage. A memorial outside the Church in the Canyon, near the site of the Sunday morning helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and eight others in Calabasas, Calif., Jan.
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