They swoop, dip and hover over traffic-choked streets to capture bird’s-eye views of sprawling cities. They can be indispensable to newscasts that are capturing the chaos of the day: multicar collisions, dramatic storm rescues or fugitives on the lam.
To do all that, news helicopters must navigate the many hazards of a crowded airspace, like drones, birds and towering buildings. But after three people were killed on Tuesday when a helicopter plummeted to the ground in Los Angeles, an old question gained new urgency: Can they operate safely?
Investigators on Wednesday were only beginning to comb through clues at the site of the blackened wreckage in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Chatsworth. The cause of the crash was unknown.
But the disaster put the dangers of aerial news gathering into stark relief, at a time when the potential of other monitoring technologies, like drones, seems to be accelerating by the day. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in Los Angeles, where news helicopters are considered critical in covering the city’s vast expanse.
The pilots of these helicopters must keep their heads on a swivel. While the flights are regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration, which sets standards for matters like altitude and communication, the pilots do not have air traffic controllers to guide them. And there is no limit to the number of helicopters that can fly in any one area.
Because of those factors, helicopters responding to a disaster — which may be operated by police departments, hospitals or news outlets — must be in constant communication with one another, said Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit that provides safety guidance to the aviation industry.
A spokesman from the F.A.A. said that helicopter pilots communicate through radio to inform one another of their whereabouts, adding that this method has been effective for decades.
According to F.A.A. data, Los Angeles County has among the highest number of registered rotorcraft — a category that includes helicopters and other aircraft with rotors to generate lift — in the nation.
Stu Mundel, an aerial photojournalist for Fox11 who has worked in the field for about a quarter century, said he had experienced two helicopter engine failures during his career, along with other frightening moments in the air.
“I can tell you many times where the thought literally goes through my mind, ‘Huh. So this is how I die,’” he said. Still, he added, risk is part of the job for helicopter pilots, and the crash on Tuesday would not change that perspective.
Helicopter reporting is not as common as it used to be. The costs of fuel, labor and maintenance make it increasingly out of reach for many local news outlets with declining funds.
But reporters still use helicopters in big cities like Los Angeles and New York. Even so, many are operated not by news stations, but by aviation companies that consolidate costs by serving multiple outlets.
Some stations use drones for aerial footage, which are far cheaper to operate. But experts say that because of the country’s current regulations on those aircraft, they cannot compare to helicopters.
The F.A.A. has regulations for airspace and restrictions on flying over people. Local and state governments can control where you can take off and can enact a complicated array of restrictions on issues like privacy and surveillance.
News crews that use drones must be certified under an F.A.A. rule known as Part 107, which require operators to register their drones and keep them in their line of sight whenever they are airborne.
That limits the distance such drones can be sent ahead of a TV truck to respond quickly to a scene. Without additional authorizations, drones are limited to certain designated airspaces, must weigh less than 55 pounds — including cameras, lights and other cargo — and fly no higher than 400 feet off the ground, except in the vicinity of certain structures.
Drone flights can be further limited by, among other reasons, temporary flight restrictions, weather, time of day or minimum visibility requirements.
The best drones for reliable, steady video footage are not limited only by federal regulations, but also by their batteries, said Matt Waite, a journalism professor who studies drone use in reporting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“You can’t fly for more than about a mile,” Mr. Waite said. “You can’t fly more than about 20 to 40 minutes. If it’s windy, God be with you. There are just a lot of limitations to this.”
A helicopter, on the other hand, can often get to a location more quickly and stay there longer. Michael Izquierdo, the chief pilot of Beverly Hills Aerials, a drone-filming company in Los Angeles, said a helicopter could fly for hours. “It can go at a higher speed; it can carry a bigger camera,” he said.
Joel Smith, a helicopter pilot and the founder of HERO Aviation, a safety management company, said that major news events like fires can draw 15 or 20 helicopters, including both responders and news outlets, to the same area at once.
“It sounds like it’s chaotic, but it’s really not,” he said. “It’s actually a very orchestrated, organized flow of traffic.”
Often, helicopters arriving at a scene operate in what is known as a stack, Mr. Smith said, with law enforcement and other responding agencies flying low, up to about 500 feet, and command helicopters flying above them. News crews can fly their helicopters even higher, he said, or laterally farther away.
Crashes like the one in Los Angeles are rare, but not unheard of. Since 2000, there have been at least eight other deadly crashes involving news-gathering helicopters, and at least 16 people have died.
While helicopter safety has been improving in recent years, the risk of accidents in rotorcraft still outpaces that of airplanes, particularly when it comes to ones that result in fatalities.
According to data compiled by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a nonprofit trade group representing general aviation, commercial helicopters recorded an accident rate of 2.66 incidents per 100,000 flight hours in 2023. That is more than twice as high as comparable accident rates for fixed-wing commercial aircraft.
Helicopter accidents generally occur most frequently when the aircraft collide with obstacles or other low-altitude hazards. Equipment failures, weather events and pilot errors, particularly when visibility is low, can also play a role. But sometimes the culprit can be something unpredictable, like a bird. Last year, a tour helicopter that crashed into the Hudson River in New York, killing six, was most likely struck by a flock of geese, according to National Transportation Safety Board documents.
Two of the people who died in the crash on Tuesday were in the helicopter: The reporter Eliana Moreno and the pilot George Marciniw had been flying together since 2023, according to the television news station NBC4.
The third person who died was a pedestrian, the authorities said.
As is often the case for helicopter news crews, Ms. Moreno and Mr. Marciniw did not work directly for NBC4. The station said that its NewsChopper4 had been operated by Angel City Air, an aerial news-gathering company based in Los Angeles and serving multiple outlets.
The company is a division of Welk Aviation, which did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. Its website says that Angel City Air has 15 years of experience operating news helicopters in Los Angeles, and it describes the city as “one of the most competitive aerial news-gathering environments in the world.”
Shawn Hubler, Josh Haner and Steven Rich contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
