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The helicopter was hurtling toward the ground at faster than 4,000 feet per minute and was traveling at about 184 mph when it crashed into a foggy hill near Calabasas, California, on Jan. 26, investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said in the report.
The impact was so great that it formed a 2-foot-deep crater on the brushy hillside. A tree branch about 30 feet away was sliced cleanly in three different spots.
Before crashing, the pilot, Ara Zobayan, had requested special permission to transit the control zones around Burbank and Van Nuys airports, which were otherwise limited to instrument-controlled flights because of a low cloud ceiling and low visibility.
Seconds before he crashed, according to the report, Zobayan told a flight controller that he was trying to climb to 4,000 feet in an attempt to get above the clouds.
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The helicopter rose to about 1,500 feet above Highway 101, which Zobayan had been attempting to follow, and began a turn to the left. The helicopter, still turning, began its steep descent eight seconds later, the report said.
An unidentified man told NTSB investigators that he had seen the blue-and-white helicopter fly out of clouds and roll to its left before it hit the hill about 50 feet away from him. A photograph taken by the witness and published by the NTSB shows bright orange flames and thick, dark smoke rising from the crash.
Much of the helicopter, a Sikorsky SK 76B outfitted to hold two pilots and eight passengers, was destroyed on impact and in a fire that broke out immediately after the crash. But “viewable sections” of its two engines showed “no evidence of an uncontained or catastrophic internal failure,” investigators said.
“The cockpit was highly fragmented,” the report said. “The instrument panel was destroyed and most instruments were displaced from their panel mounts. Flight controls were fragmented and fire damaged.”
All eight passengers on the flight were heading to a basketball tournament at a sports academy Bryant sponsored, Mamba Sports Academy, in Thousand Oaks, California.
Bryant’s daughter, Gianna Bryant, 13, was among the dead, as were two of her teammates on the team Bryant coached.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .