Kobe Bryant, the five-time NBA champion who spent his whole 20-year career with the Los Angeles Lakers, died on the morning of Sunday 26 January 2020 when the helicopter carrying him crashed into a hillside in Calabasas, California. He was 41. His 13-year-old daughter Gianna, known as Gigi, and seven other people were also killed: six passengers travelling with them to a youth basketball game, and the pilot. There were no survivors.
The news spread within minutes of the first reports, and for days the sports world talked about little else. Here is what happened on the flight, who was on board, what investigators later concluded, and why the loss was felt so widely.
Former NBA super star and 5-time NBA champion Kobe Bryant is reportedly among the five people confirmed dead, after the helicopter they were traveling crashed in #Calabasas , Los Angeles. pic.twitter.com/2DYAx2p3yx
— News_Executive (@News_Executive) January 26, 2020
What happened on 26 January 2020
The Sikorsky S-76B helicopter, operated by Island Express Helicopters, left John Wayne Airport in Orange County at about 9:06 a.m. local time. It was heading to Camarillo Airport, a short drive from the Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, where Bryant was due to coach Gianna's team that day.
The morning was foggy. A thick marine layer had pushed low cloud into the Santa Monica Mountains, and the Los Angeles Police Department had grounded its own helicopters because visibility and the cloud ceiling were below its minimums. Around 9:45 a.m. the aircraft struck a hillside near Las Virgenes Road and caught fire. The first emergency call came in two minutes later.
#Update Downed aircraft is a helicopter. Flames extinguished. #Malibu deputies at crash site looking for survivors, 4200 blk Las Virgenes Rd #Calabasas #LASD pic.twitter.com/eixLhGhLyE
— LA County Sheriffs (@LASDHQ) January 26, 2020
Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies and firefighters reached the steep site quickly, but no one on board had survived. Early reports, including the tweets embedded here, spoke of five dead; the confirmed toll was nine. Bryant's wife Vanessa and their three other daughters were not on the helicopter.
Aerial photographs from that morning show smoke rising from the wreckage on a brush-covered slope above Calabasas, with fire crews on the road below. The terrain and the fog made the recovery slow and difficult.
Flight-tracking data, like the Flightradar24 map above, showed the helicopter's route from Orange County north past central Los Angeles and Glendale, then west along the US-101 corridor toward the hills where it went down. According to the Daily Mail's report at the time, the last signal from the aircraft was received at about 9:45 a.m.
The video above shows the crash scene and the emergency response; it may be upsetting for some viewers.
The nine people on board
Alongside Kobe and Gianna Bryant, the passengers were John Altobelli, a long-serving baseball coach at Orange Coast College, his wife Keri and their daughter Alyssa, who played on Gianna's team; Sarah Chester and her daughter Payton, another teammate; and Christina Mauser, an assistant coach with the team. The pilot was Ara Zobayan, an experienced commercial helicopter pilot with an instrument rating who had flown Bryant many times before.
Kobe with his daughter, Gianna, nicknamed Gigi. Allen Berezovsky/Getty
Gianna was a gifted and committed player who had reportedly talked about one day playing for the University of Connecticut, the powerhouse of women's college basketball. Father and daughter were regulars courtside at Lakers and WNBA games in the months before the crash, and those photographs became some of the most widely shared images of the following week.
Bryant spoke often about being a "girl dad" to his four daughters. That phrase became a hashtag after ESPN presenter Elle Duncan described, on air, a conversation in which he told her how proud he was of them.
His last weekend in the game
The night before he died, LeBron James, now a Laker himself, passed Bryant's career total of 33,643 points to move into third place on the NBA's all-time scoring list. Bryant congratulated him publicly. His final tweet and his final Instagram post, published that Saturday evening, were messages of respect for James.
Kobe Bryant (@kobebryant) on
The scoring graphic above, shared widely that weekend, shows the top five at that moment: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan.
Twenty seasons with the Lakers
Drafted 13th overall in 1996 straight out of high school and traded to Los Angeles on draft night, Bryant never played for another NBA team. His record speaks for itself:
- five championships (2000, 2001, 2002, 2009 and 2010) and two NBA Finals MVP awards;
- the 2008 regular-season MVP award and two scoring titles;
- 18 All-Star selections;
- 81 points against the Toronto Raptors on 22 January 2006, the second-highest single-game total in NBA history;
- 60 points in his final game, on 13 April 2016;
- 33,643 career points, and the youngest player to reach 30,000, at 34 years and 104 days.
The Lakers retired both of his shirt numbers, 8 and 24, in 2017. A year later his short film Dear Basketball, based on the poem he wrote to announce his retirement, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2020, months after his death.
"Mamba Out", the two words he used to sign off at the end of his farewell speech in 2016, became the caption on thousands of tributes. The nickname came from the Black Mamba persona he adopted to separate his on-court focus from the rest of his life, and the "Mamba mentality" he described, a relentless approach to preparation and self-improvement, is one of the things fans and players most often cite as his legacy.
How the world reacted
Within hours, fans gathered outside the arena then known as the Staples Center, where the Grammy Awards were held that same evening and opened with a tribute to him. The makeshift memorial grew so large that staff later collected the items and passed nonperishable ones, including about 1,350 basketballs, to the Bryant family. NBA teams took deliberate 24-second and 8-second violations at the start of games in his honour.
You kept on redefining Greatness 💯 with a mentality bigger than life 🌍!
— Joey Geadah (@JoeyGeadah) January 26, 2020
#KOBE "The G.O.A.T 🐐" BRYANT
R.I.P 🙏🏻 🌹🕯& eternal THANK YOU!#Mamba_out 🎤✌ pic.twitter.com/wsHYnMWQfi
It is with great sadness that we learn of the death of Kobe Bryant and four others in a helicopter crash in Calabasas. The aircraft went down in a remote field off Las Virgenes around 10:00 this morning. Nobody on the ground was hurt. The FAA and NTSB are investigating.
— City of Calabasas (@CityofCalabasas) January 26, 2020
The City of Calabasas confirmed that nobody on the ground was hurt and that the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had begun investigating.
CBS
You'll always be a great inspiration for all of the Athletes.
— مهند (@hondaaa80) January 26, 2020
Rip kobe Bryant 💔#Mamba_out pic.twitter.com/Q2MYFq9UtG
Kobe and Vanessa Bryant had been married since 2001. In the years after the crash she became a prominent voice for the families, both in the courts and in keeping the work of the Mamba and Mambacita Sports Foundation going.
What the investigation found
The NTSB announced its findings on 9 February 2021. It concluded that the probable cause was the pilot's decision to continue flying under visual flight rules into cloud, which led to spatial disorientation and a loss of control. In poor visibility, he appears to have believed the helicopter was climbing when it was in fact descending and banking toward the hillside.
The board listed three contributing factors: likely self-induced pressure on the pilot to complete the trip, plan continuation bias (the tendency to keep going with an original plan even as conditions change), and Island Express's inadequate review and oversight of its safety management processes. The helicopter did not have a terrain awareness and warning system, but the NTSB judged that such a system was unlikely to have prevented this crash, given the pilot's disorientation.
Lawsuits that followed
Vanessa Bryant filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Island Express and the pilot's estate in February 2020; it was later reported to have been settled. A second case dealt with how the crash scene was treated: Los Angeles County deputies and firefighters had taken and shared photographs of the victims' remains. In August 2022 a federal jury found the county liable for invasion of privacy and emotional distress, awarding $16 million to Vanessa Bryant and $15 million to Chris Chester, whose wife and daughter also died.
The crash became a case study in aviation safety for one uncomfortable reason: it involved an experienced pilot, a well-maintained aircraft and a familiar route, and still ended in disaster once the weather closed in.
Sources: Wikipedia: 2020 Calabasas helicopter crash; Wikipedia: Kobe Bryant. First reports came from TMZ and the Daily Mail on 26 January 2020. Photographs: Allen Berezovsky/Getty Images, Reuters, Backgrid, Flightradar24 and CBS as credited in the images.
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