{"id":224514,"date":"2026-09-17T13:24:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/nbc-los-angeles-helicopter-crash-shatters-tight-knit-local-news-community-nbcnews-com\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T13:24:45","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:24:45","slug":"nbc-los-angeles-helicopter-crash-shatters-tight-knit-local-news-community-nbcnews-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/nbc-los-angeles-helicopter-crash-shatters-tight-knit-local-news-community-nbcnews-com\/","title":{"rendered":"NBC Los Angeles helicopter crash shatters tight-knit local news community – nbcnews.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

Morning Rundown: AI execs say they can regulate themselves, Trump trashes Fed after rate hike, and L.A. chopper crash shatters tight-knit community<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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The television news helicopters that circle Los Angeles have been fixtures of the city\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 <\/a>killed the two people aboard, journalist Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw, <\/a>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\u2019s second-largest broadcasting center.
NBC Los Angeles\u2019 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\u2019s 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\u2019s most recognizable broadcasting personalities, confirmed on air hours later that the station\u2019s helicopter had gone down. Hands clasped, she spoke haltingly and seemed to fight back tears.
\u201cWe\u2019ve been piecing it together here. We knew it was a news chopper, we knew we\u2019d lost contact with our people out there, and we\u2019ve just received the confirmation that, in fact, NewsChopper4 went down just before 7 o\u2019clock tonight in Chatsworth,\u201d Williams said to the camera. \u201cWe are going to take a couple of minutes to think about that, to process and to regroup.\u201d
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.
\u201cThis is a very, very, very tragic day in Los Angeles,\u201d 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 \u2014 \u201ccome together.\u201d
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\u2019s accidents were so devastating for the city partly because of the familial atmosphere inside the walls of its local newsrooms.
\u201cWhat 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,\u201d he said in a phone interview. \u201cWhenever I would hire somebody for these types of helicopter jobs, I worried about their safety.\u201d
In a post on X, Frank Buckley, an anchor at KTLA, paid tribute to \u201cour friends at NBCLA on a painful evening.\u201d
\u201cThe 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,\u201d 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 \u201cessential to covering the biggest stories in the vast news market of Southern California.\u201d (In fact, news helicopters were pioneered in Los Angeles<\/a> in the late 1950s.)
\u201cI interned at NBC4 for years in college. Their team is filled with extraordinary people and great journalists,\u201d Michaelson wrote in part<\/a>. \u201cMy heart breaks for their team and the loved ones of everyone who lost their lives.\u201d
Tuesday\u2019s chopper accident took place 49 years after a Bell 206 news helicopter piloted by KNBC\u2019s 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 <\/a>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 \u201ccompounded\u201d by news that the city itself had been struck by \u201ca double tragedy.\u201d
\u201cThe poor people that were caught in that bus crash today, I don\u2019t want them to be forgotten either,\u201d he said.
Shaw then invoked one of the core tenets of the news profession.
\u201cWe\u2019re always saying, out of safety: Cover the news, don\u2019t be the news,\u201d he said. \u201cUnfortunately, gut-wrenchingly, they were part of the news tonight.\u201d
Daniel Arkin is a senior reporter at NBC News.
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Morning Rundown: AI execs say they can regulate themselves, Trump trashes Fed after rate hike, and L.A. chopper crash shatters tight-knit community news AlertsThere are no new alerts at this timeThe television news helicopters that circle Los Angeles have been fixtures of the city\u2019s sky for decades, symbols of a hard-driving but close-knit media market. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":224515,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}