There were several news helicopters over Chatsworth on the evening of 15 September. A Metro bus and an SUV had collided in the west San Fernando Valley and people had died, so the aircraft that cover Los Angeles from above had gathered, as they do.

Just before 7 p.m., one of them came down between two commercial buildings on North Mason Avenue.

Reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw were killed. So was a man on the ground, 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia. Two more people were taken to hospital.

What Is Known

The helicopter went down in a parking lot between two commercial buildings and caught fire. Four cars and two storage containers were damaged. The Los Angeles Fire Department reached a wreck that was almost unrecognisable.

The National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation and identified the aircraft as a Eurocopter AS350 B2. That is the only formal statement about the machine so far. Witnesses described the helicopter appearing to sway before it descended, but witness accounts are not findings, and no cause has been established.

It will be a long time before there is an answer. NTSB helicopter investigations routinely take a year or more, and the preliminary report, when it appears, will describe what happened rather than why.

The Aircraft and the Job

The AS350 is one of the most widely used helicopters in the world and the standard machine for American aerial newsgathering. Light, single-engined, good visibility, comfortable loitering for long periods with a gimbal camera under the nose.

The work it does over Los Angeles is unlike almost any other kind of civil flying. Orbiting a moving event at low level, over a dense city, holding a camera steady on a target while somebody in the other seat talks live on air, often with several other aircraft doing exactly the same thing over the same intersection.

Los Angeles television has flown that mission since the 1950s and it has never been routine. There is a reason the local aviation community is small and knows one another.

The People

Eliana Moreno was born in Orange County and graduated from Chapman University in 2010 with a degree in broadcast journalism and political science. She joined the Angel City Air team that same September and spent the next sixteen years reporting from the air for Southern California stations. For NBC4 and Telemundo 52 viewers, hers was the voice that came with the pictures.

George Marciniw grew up in Southern California and graduated from Burbank High School in 1974. Neighbours described him as a quiet, kind churchgoer.

The two had been flying together since 2023, over wildfires, police pursuits and victory parades. Colleagues described them afterwards as magic in the sky.

Colleagues at NBC4 Los Angeles remember Eliana Moreno and George Marciniw.

Edy Gutierrez Mejia was 29 and, according to reporting since, visiting from Guatemala. He was on the ground, near a parking lot, on an ordinary Tuesday evening.

A Hard Day for One Neighbourhood

Five people died in Chatsworth that evening, two in the bus collision and three in the crash of the aircraft sent to report on it. A vigil was held at St John Eudes Parish, a few minutes from where the helicopter came down. Moreno and Marciniw will be added to the journalists memorial.

Aerial newsgathering is one of those jobs that is invisible until it is not. Somebody has to be up there for the pictures to exist. On 15 September, two people who had done it for years were going to work, and a third person was simply standing in the wrong place.

Sources: NBC Los Angeles; NBC News; National Transportation Safety Board; Los Angeles Fire Department; KTLA