News helicopter crashes in Chatsworth, killing three Play

It was a dreadful night Tuesday in the western San Fernando Valley. A TV station's helicopter crashed while covering a horrific bus crash that killed three people.

Inside the chopper were NBC 4 reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw. Both were killed. A third person on the ground was also killed. No identification for him yet.

Tuesday at about 8:50 p.m., KNBC anchor Colleen Williams made the dreadful announcement, confirming that the chopper that went down in Chatsworth about two hours earlier was in fact News Chopper 4. She said they had lost contact with their people and had just received confirmation that News Chopper 4 went down just before 7 p.m. in Chatsworth.

One witness to the crash said the helicopter was swaying before it started to lose altitude. "It was just getting lower and lower and lower and lower," the witness said on NBC's Today Show.

Jennifer York, a former Skycam 5 reporter above L.A. for more than a decade, told KTLA Wednesday morning that air safety was always the most important thing for the fleet of choppers covering news over Los Angeles. She said the pilots are incredibly well trained and it is hard to imagine what could have caused this, given they would have done a pre-flight check and it went down so quickly.

ABC aviation expert John Nance says it may take weeks to determine what went wrong, but it looks like something failed inside News Chopper 4. He said if a large fire happens right after impact, that indicates a fuel breach in the tanks that ignited, though whether it ignited before the chopper went down has yet to be determined.

The crashed chopper was owned and operated by a helicopter company called Angel City Air. Both KTLA and KNBC/KVEA operate their helicopters out of a shared base at Angel City Air.

There has never been a midair helicopter collision involving LA TV news choppers. One did occur over Phoenix more than 20 years ago. Back in 1977, a KNBC helicopter ran out of gas and crashed on a freeway in Van Nuys. Pilot Francis Gary Powers and photographer George Spears were killed in that one.