About Kobe Bryant's fatal accident and the revealed text messages

Over five months after the fatal plane crash that took the life of basketball star Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven other people, text messages exchanged between those involved in monitoring the flight that ended with the aircraft crashing into a hill in the Calabasas area of California have been made public, as reported by laopinio.com.

These testimonies, presented by the Los Angeles Times, are among the over 1700 pages of transcripts and other evidence published by the National Transportation Safety Board and released last month as part of the investigations, which allow reconstructing the moments of anguish that accompanied the tragic accident resulting in the death of nine individuals.

According to the publication, at 09:06, the agent who organized the flight in which Bryant was traveling sent a message indicating the takeoff of the helicopter from Santa Ana's John Wayne Airport, heading to the Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, as they had done that morning before and at least ten times last year with pilot Ara Zobayan at the helm.

"It just started raining lightly here," wrote one of Bryant's drivers at 09:33, who was located at Camarillo Airport, where they would land.

"Land?" asked an employee of the agent at 09:48, three minutes after the scheduled arrival time. "Not yet," replied the driver one minute later.

About fifteen minutes later, concern began to invade those involved. "Ara, are you okay?" wrote the agent at 10:02 without receiving a response. The helicopter had crashed 17 minutes earlier.

The testimonies collected in the investigation indicate that Zobayan was the pilot with whom Bryant felt most comfortable traveling and that they had even formed a bond that gave the basketball star more confidence.

Although the presented report a few weeks ago was inconclusive, the evidence suggests that Zobayan may have been subject to a phenomenon known as 'somatogravic illusion,' by which he may have become disoriented when entering a cloud bank and tried to fly above the clouds when, on the contrary, he was losing altitude and plunging. (D)