The collision of the bus and the S.U.V. had been big, even by Los Angeles eye-in-the-sky standards. Desmond Shaw was stunned by its force.
Mr. Shaw, a veteran helicopter reporter, had gazed at the wreck from above, transfixed. His aircraft was one in a swarm hovering high over the San Fernando Valley on Tuesday. The transit vehicle had been bashed like a toy, the S.U.V. gutting its midsection. The authorities were saying people were dead.
Mr. Shaw had been back at work less than a week after taking a leave prompted by the deaths of both parents, and he had been thinking lately about mortality. The crash was eerie for him, and he was glad to be done with the story.
But shortly after he and his pilot flew away, the newsroom called back: An aircraft appeared to have gone down near the scene of the bus crash.
Mr. Shaw, a 45-year-old who works for a CBS affiliate, thought of his fellow reporters aloft — colleagues for whom the air was their office.
“As soon as we got there and saw the fireball and the rotor blades, we knew what it was,” he said, speaking in an interview from his car early Wednesday. “It was the day we all dread.”
The back-to-back bus and helicopter crashes killed at least five people and strewed blackened wreckage in the Chatsworth neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Shortly after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, the S.U.V. broadsided a Los Angeles Metro bus, killing at least two people and critically injuring others. The driver has been charged with murder, the police said.
Then, around 7 p.m., a helicopter reporting for a local NBC affiliate plummeted to the ground and burst into flames, a disaster whose cause is under federal investigation. The reporter, Eliana Moreno, and the pilot, George Marciniw, were killed, along with a person on the ground.
The helicopter was just one of a fleet that zips over Southern California’s vastness, tracking events like car chases and wildfires. Most of them are supplied by contractors who provide aircraft and reporters to news stations. The choppers, swashbuckling and loud, are a signature of the region, indispensable in a metropolis encompassing thousands of square miles.
In 1992, they carried the news during the Los Angeles riots, as crowds at the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues attacked the trucker Reginald Denny. Two years later, they filled the sky when O.J. Simpson led the police on a riveting two-hour chase through Southern California freeways. Come flames or floods, Rose Parades or ICE protests, they are as ubiquitous as seabirds, watching and swooping in from above.
But the crash on Tuesday night of an aircraft trying to cover a spectacular collision underscored another aspect of Los Angeles’s aerial news culture: the risks.
Helicopter crews across the United States say they must remain on constant lookout for hazards such as drones and bird strikes, as well as pilot error and mechanical failure.
Although driving on freeways is statistically more dangerous than air travel, the crash of a tourist chopper in the Hudson River last year and the 2020 accident that killed the N.B.A. legend Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter and seven others have highlighted the long odds of surviving a helicopter accident.
Since 2000, there have been at least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters in the United States, killing 16 people, federal accident records and news accounts show.
In Los Angeles, two people were seriously injured in 2000 when a news helicopter covering the Academy Awards crashed at Van Nuys Airport.
At NBC4, formally known as KNBC, Tuesday’s tragedy summoned the memory of the 1977 helicopter crash that killed Francis Gary Powers. A former reconnaissance plane pilot, Mr. Powers had survived being shot down over the Soviet Union during the Cold War only to perish on his way back from covering a wildfire.
In the interview on Wednesday, Mr. Shaw, the CBS affiliate reporter, said that helicopter journalists have to put aside their fears.
“You have to push it to the back of your brain or you can’t do the job,” he said. “I had a fear of heights when I was a kid. Now I’m sometimes up 10,000 feet high.”
Mr. Shaw has worked in broadcasting since his college days at California State University, Northridge, and later became that most specific of Los Angeles media figures: a radio traffic reporter. For more than a decade, he flew above the freeways, keeping motorists apprised of hazards, from “gawker’s block” to jackknifed big rigs, as well as the occasional disaster or wildfire.
He joined CBS Los Angeles in 2015, and has been a full-time reporter and cameraman there for six years. He said he was well acquainted with Ms. Moreno and Mr. Marciniw.
“We knew pretty quickly who it was,” he said. “It’s a pretty tight-knit community. There are probably a dozen of us, or maybe less, who report on air and run the camera.”
NBC4 said on Tuesday that its NewsChopper4 was owned and operated by a vendor based in Los Angeles, Angel City Air, and that Ms. Moreno and Mr. Marciniw had been Angel City Air employees.
Mr. Shaw said that he had run into them at airports over the years as they covered breaking stories, and that he knew their voices by heart from broadcasts. So did the other reporters hovering overhead at the time of the crash.
A video from inside NewsChopper4, which was broadcasting live at the time, captured the final moments. As the chopper descends for a closer look at the bus crash, the engine can be heard winding down. A warning horn sounds and the helicopter abruptly tries ascending. “What — you can’t, you can’t pull up?” Ms. Moreno says, her voice panicked as the image begins violently shaking. The picture goes white and then goes black.
Zoey Tur, a veteran news helicopter pilot and reporter who spent more than three decades covering Southern California, said she recognized the telltale sounds of engine failure.
“You can hear the blades slowing,” she said. “You can hear the sound of the turbine engine shutting down.”
Fabian Salazar, an investigator with National Transportation Safety Board, said at a news conference on Wednesday that investigators were combing through the crash site in Chatsworth. But the most crucial evidence, he said, was the video broadcast by the helicopter in its final moments. The agency plans to release a preliminary report on the accident in about 30 days, he said.
The impact has rippled through the airborne media community in Los Angeles like a shock wave.
“Heartbreaking doesn’t begin to describe it,” Mr. Shaw said.
Mr. Shaw and his pilot didn’t see the crash, only the devastation that followed in Chatsworth. The hours since have been a blur, he said: speaking on the air with his station’s news anchors and reassuring his loved ones that he was all right.
He took time in his car for one last interview before going home in the dark to greet his dogs, Lonzo and Scruffy, and hug his husband, Brandon. His phone, he said, had been sounding off all night with messages of concern and condolence.
“Everyone is asking if I’m OK,” he said. “Honestly? No. But I’m alive.”
Orlando Mayorquín contributed reporting.
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