Jeff Wise

Today the National Transport Safety Board released its preliminary report into the January 26 helicopter crash in Calabasas, California, that killed Kobe Bryant and eight others. For the first time, it revealed that moments before impact the pilot deliberately broke FAA regulations meant to prevent just such kinds of accidents.

As previously reported, in the minutes prior to the crash, pilot Ara Zobayan was flying just a few hundred feet over the floor of the San Fernando Valley, which lies at an elevation of 800 feet. An opaque layer of overcast clouds covered the area at an altitude of 1,900 feet. As Zobayan reached the southwestern edge of the valley and crossed into Calabasas, the ground below him climbed higher until he was zooming 150 mph over the road at scarcely more than 100 feet, with hillsides rising up on either side into the low clouds.

Technically, Zobayan was allowed by FAA regulations to fly this way. According to Visual Flight Rules, as long he could see at least half a mile and stayed out of the clouds, he’d remain legal. But it afforded him little margin for error. Evidently, he decided it would be safer or more comfortable to climb to a higher altitude where he would have better visibility and room for maneuver. At 9:45 a.m., according to the new NTSB report, Zobayan called air traffic control and told them that he was going to climb up above the cloud layers to an altitude of 4,000 feet, which would put him comfortably above the cloud tops at 2,400 feet.

Up there, he’d be well above the rugged terrain and be able to see for miles. The problem was that to get there, he’d have to climb through 500 vertical feet of white-out clouds. “Its absolutely deliberately breaking the VFR rules,” says Paul Cline, assistant professor of aviation at the City University of New York.

The reason flying up into a cloud layer is illegal is because there’s a high danger of exactly what happened: Without visual reference to the ground, a pilot becomes disoriented, loses track of which way is up, and augurs in to the ground.

Ironically, the new report also reveals that just nine months before the crash Zobayan had received proficiency training in “inadvertent entry into instrument meteorological conditions and unusual attitude recovery” — in other words, the exact things that killed him.

This article appeared on February 7, 2020 in New York magazine.

The very rich fly differently than you and me, and not just in terms of coach versus first class. They have helicopters and private jets to zip around the globe in privacy and comfort. But top-drawer travel budgets don’t necessarily afford anyone an extra measure of safety. In fact, just the opposite: Private air travel can come with risks that commercial passengers never take on.

Why? Because the rules are looser for the privileged—and when it comes to safety, that’s not to their advantage. Whereas the commercial airliners that ordinary schlubs are consigned to must conform to the most stringent regulations—what the FAA calls “Part 121”—chartered aircraft fall under a more lax set of rules called “Part 135,” and sometimes an even less strict set, “Part 91,” that covers noncommercial flying, such as when aircraft owners pilot the plane themselves. (The word part refers to the fact that the rules are organized into sections, or parts, of the government’s Code of Federal Regulations.)

The consequences of the different safety standards can be seen in accident statistics. According to data compiled by the National Transportation Safety Board, in 2018 there were six fatal Part 135 crashes resulting in 12 deaths, versus just one Part 121 accident resulting in a single death. This, despite the fact that nearly five times as many hours were flown under Part 121 as under Part 135. Continue reading Vanity Fair: The Dangers of Flying Rich

While the cause of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and seven others has not yet been determined, the weather and terrain conditions in the Los Angeles area on Sunday were similar to those that have killed many helicopter pilots over the years, with fog and clouds masking rugged, rising terrain.  The reconstruction of his flight that follows is based on information from transponder data, air traffic control audio recordings, and my own experience as a pilot who was trained in the exact area where the incident took place.

Bryant’s helicopter, a Sikorsky S-76B built in 1991, took off shortly after 9 a.m. from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, which is located near the coast approximately 35 miles south of downtown LA. According to the New York Post, Bryant and the eight other passengers were heading to a basketball game at his Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, approximately 70 miles to the northwest. Over the course of the next 40 minutes the helicopter would trace a circuitous route around the Los Angeles basin as it negotiated mountains and busy airspace in three main phases: first, cutting across the broad coastal plain of central Los Angeles, then winding around the basin of the San Fernando Valley to its north, before a final ill-fated attempt to cross the rising terrain that led west to Thousand Oaks.

At takeoff a few minutes after 9 a.m., the weather was marginal, with a solid overcast at 1300 feet and visibility of about 5 miles in a thin haze. The pilot was flying according to “Visual Flight Rules,” or VFR, meaning that he was relying on his ability to see the terrain below him, and hence had to stay below the clouds. As an alternative, he could have contacted air traffic controllers and switched to “Instrument Flight Rules,” or IFR, that would have allowed him to climb up through the clouds. Controllers would have given him a series of waypoints to follow that would keep him well clear of terrain, dangerous weather, and other aircraft. Flying IFR, however, is time-consuming and constrains pilots to following the directions of controllers. “Southern California airspace is extremely busy, and they might tell you to wait an hour,” assistant professor of aviation at the City University of New York Paul Cline told me. “You’re just one of many waiting in line, and it doesn’t matter if you’re Kobe Bryant.”

So the helicopter continued under visual flight rules. Continue reading New York: Kobe Bryant’s Helicopter Likely Succumbed to Well-Known Danger

A month after swarms of drones began appearing over Colorado and Nebraska, their provenance remains a mystery. How to even start? Authorities have admonished that it’s illegal to shoot them down, and no one’s managed to intercept a tell-tale electronic signal. No one’s even managed to take a clear picture of one. But there might be another way.

The scope and persistence of the operation implies that some significant entity is behind them — someone, most likely, with too much to lose to risk operating without the necessary paperwork from the Federal Aviation Administration. Could the answer to the riddle lie within an FAA database?

There are two sets of records you’d want to explore because there are two processes under which the FAA permits commercial drone flight. The first is called Part 107. To operate under these guidelines, an operator gets a Remote Pilot Certificate and registers a drone with the FAA. They can then fly pretty much anywhere, so long as they follow certain restrictions: They can’t operate at night, or fly over people, or operate from a moving vehicle, for instance. If they want to do any of these things they need to apply for a waiver.

The second form of permission is called a Certificate of Authorization, or COA. In the past these have tended to be used by public agencies like the Department of the Interior and the branches of the military. These are fairly cumbersome to obtain, but once in hand allow an operator a good deal of freedom within a defined area. They’ve fallen out of favor in recent years, however, and a search of the FAA’s database suggests that the most recent ones expired in 2015. “Many agencies are choosing to operate under Part 107,” FAA spokesperson Ian Gregor explained via email. So we can forget about these.

Back to Part 107. Based on published accounts, the Colorado drones always fly at night, sometimes fly in coordinated swarms, and fly significant distances. To do all of these things, an operator would need waivers 107.29 (flying at night), 107.31 (flying beyond visual range of the operator), and 107.35 (multiple drones flown by one operator). Out of the thousands of waivers issued, only five companies were issued a waiver valid for all three. One of those has since gone out of business.

That leaves four. Continue reading New York: Who’s Behind Those Mystery Drone Swarms? An Investigation

What began Wednesday morning as a wild internet rumor had by lunchtime Thursday become close to a settled—though still scarcely imaginable—fact: that Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, a Boeing 737 with 176 people aboard, had crashed near Tehran not due to technical issues, as Iranian authorities initially claimed, but as a result of an Iranian antiaircraft missile strike.

While there was no direct evidence of a shoot-down in the first hours after the crash, the incident had seemed suspicious from the get-go. Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport at 6:12 a.m. local time, just hours after Iran’s military had launched multiple ballistic missiles at U.S. air bases in Iraq. President Trump had threatened that America would attack 52 targets in Iran if the country retaliated for the U.S. assassination of its top general, Qasem Soleimani; it stands to reason that Iranian air defense forces must have been on the highest possible state of alert. What’s more, the plane disappeared from air traffic control screens abruptly, and without the crew issuing a mayday—all suggestive of a sudden, catastrophic event. Trump’s bluster and unpredictability, lauded by some of his allies as a strategic virtue, almost certainly contributed to the conditions that allowed this grievous mistake to be made. This is the sort of thing that happens during a war.

For the first 24 hours, however, the U.S. and its allies said nothing about a shoot-down. Reuters reported that “the initial assessment of Western intelligence agencies was that the plane had suffered a technical malfunction.” Then, on Thursday, Newsweek quoted “one Pentagon and one U.S. senior intelligence official” as saying that the plane had been shot down. Hours later, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau confirmed the story at a press conference. Continue reading Vanity Fair: How Trump’s Iran War Bluster Paved The Way for the Ukrainian Airliner Shoot-Down