This is the daughter. Unimaginable. This clip of Kobe talking basketball with her was going viral just a few weeks ago. Absolutely ****ing awful. I don’t usually get hit hard by celebrity deaths, but the idea of a father and daughter with such a clear bond perishing together, with SO much life in front of each of them is just so tough to take.

Kiss your wife, hug your children, call your mom and dad. You never know when it’s all gonna end.

RIP Mamba

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/...2/326/kobe.jpg

That's awful.
Damnit....

Auto-rotation is supposed to help, but all too often it doesn’t seem to help at all

Stop.

Once again it goes to show just how fragile and fleeting life is.....guy had everyone he could ask for yet all gone.

Really sad on so many levels, even for non-followers of the NBA.

His father was my basketball coach for a game in the 70's at Pocono Invitational Basketball Camp in PA. Really cool guy.

So sorry for his family.

If you have trouble, it's notably more risky to go from one engine to zero than it is to go from two engines to one.

Plus, I figure pilot experience is probably a big differentiator.

Exactly.

It takes maybe a dozen flight hours to be able to fly in ideal conditions. Even landings aren't that tough (and take-offs are a day 2 thing).

But so many private pilots just aren't prepared for adversity. And really, the difference between redundancies on commercial craft vs. private are so enormous.

Flight's simple - lift + velocity. Wings and a motor = flying. Flight surfaces are laughably rudimentary; just redirecting air to steer. So stuff like ultralights are as simple (in many ways more simple) than an economy car.

Commercial craft have the long-term viability chuck hundreds of thousands of dollars in redundancy into and they easily pay for themselves. But to make a commercially viable private aircraft that has those kinds of backup systems is prohibitively expensive for most.

And frankly on a helicopter it's just borderline impossible. Think of how many of those tend to go down in war due to mechanical difficulties. They're just so damn complicated that any kind of system failure is borderline catastrophic.

Like I said - I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often more than anything. It's an inherently dangerous activity.

What blows my mind is that our government for decades has used a helicopter to take the President from the White House to the airport. If I was President, I would refuse to ever step in the helicopter. They can drive me to the airport. Might be slower, but safer IMHO.

Reminds me of John Denver.

Yeah, I've read that helicopters can be surprisingly survivable because of that. Obviously not in every case, though.

That picture above hurts real bad. God damn.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Sources: Kobe Bryant was on his way to a travel basketball game with his daughter Gianna when the helicopter crashed. Those aboard the helicopter also included another player and parent.</p>&mdash; Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) <a href="https://twitter.com/wojespn/status/1221537476893925376?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 26, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Ours was a 172 w/ an engine conversion to give it the guts of a 182. And yeah, built in the late 60s, early 70s.

I never felt unsafe on it; we didn't **** around with safety or maintenance. Any flight that might encounter weather was just scrubbed and the hearing continued. But I had an instructor who put us through some adversity paces and do shit like surreptitiously kill the motor without telling us. And that rattled the hell out of me.

It wasn't hard to convince me to walk away because as comfortable as I am w/ vehicles, I knew I was lying to myself when I'd say I was ready for real adversity. The 'carb heater' trick and the like would just rattle me more than I'd expect.

We wasted all the flight training and took a bath on the sale, but nobody really cared at that point. Someone was going to be killed or seriously injured at some point so it was the right decision. I haven't been on a light aircraft since and really don't expect that I will be again.

Juice just isn't worth the squeeze.

Awful.

RIP Kobe.

Choppers are just inherently dangerous, instead of gliding through the air they beat it to death