Kobe Bryant's Helicopter Lacked Key Warning System

The board urged federal regulators to require installation of the system on all helicopters. “It is well past time for the benefits from these standard safety devices to be made available to passengers on helicopter transports,” the board’s acting chairman said when announcing the recommendation in 2006.

Fourteen years later, use of the system is still voluntary. The helicopter that plowed into a foggy hillside near Calabasas, California, on Sunday, killing retired basketball star Kobe Bryant and eight other people, was not outfitted with the system, known as a terrain awareness and warning system, or TAWS, said NTSB board member Jennifer Homendy.

TAWS can help prevent crashes, especially when pilots have limited visibility, by providing a detailed image of surrounding terrain and triggering auditory and visual warnings. But it is too early to know whether the lack of the warning system played any role in Sunday’s crash.

In a news conference Tuesday, officials said that Ara Zobayan, 50, who was flying the helicopter that crashed, had logged more than 8,200 hours of flight time. At least 1,250 of those hours were in the Sikorsky S-76B, the model of helicopter he was flying Sunday.

The day before the crash, Zobayan had made the same trip from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, where Bryant lived, to Camarillo, near the Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, where the basketball tournament was being held. Homendy said Zobayan had used a more direct route for the roughly 90-mile trip northwest and that the skies were clear.

A reporter was reinstated after tweeting about Bryant’s sexual assault case.

The Washington Post reporter who referred to a sexual assault charge against Bryant on Twitter in the hours after his death has been cleared to go back to work.

The newspaper had put the reporter, Felicia Sonmez, on paid administrative leave Sunday, saying her Twitter posts “displayed poor judgment.” More than 300 of her colleagues rallied to her defense Monday, arguing in a petition to Post management that Sonmez had not violated the newspaper’s social media guidelines, a set of rules asking its journalists not to share opinions online.

On Tuesday, the paper issued a statement from its managing editor, Tracy Grant, saying that, after a review, it had concluded that Sonmez “was not in clear and direct violation of our social media policy.”

The statement also referred to her tweets as “ill-timed” and continued: “We consistently urge restraint, which is particularly important when there are tragic deaths. We regret having spoken publicly about a personnel matter.”

Bryant was arrested and charged with felony sexual assault after an encounter with a 19-year-old hotel worker in Vail, Colorado. The criminal case was dropped in 2004, and the following year, Bryant reached a private settlement with the accuser.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .