The investigation into Sunday’s tragic fatal crash of a helicopter carrying retired basketball star Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others, including the pilot, will likely take months, with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigating every aspect of the flight.



While it may seem fairly obvious what transpired—the Sikorsky S-76 flew into low-visibility conditions and crashed into a hillside—there could be any number of what the NTSB refers to as “contributing factors” in the accident. Investigators will look into the pilot’s background and his performance during the flight, the safety record of the company that operated the helicopter, the condition of all the equipment on board, witness reports, and the information the pilot received from air traffic control. They’ll even dig into the interactions between the pilot, the passengers, and everyone involved in the flight to see if external pressures led to faulty decision making. Indeed, Bryant’s mere presence on the helicopter could itself have been a factor. In the end, there will be a “root cause” that may be completely unrelated to what we already know, or the sequence of events may be crystal-clear.

Regardless, the crash—likely preventable, potentially survivable under the right circumstances—highlights an urgent need in aviation for truly next-generation safety innovation.

While the industry has come an incredibly long way since it began modernizing after World War II, particularly with the advent of commercial aviation and unsparing post-crash investigations, placing complex mechanical objects in the sky with human passengers on board remains a dicey proposition. It’s still the safest form of transportation by a huge margin, but as we see from incidents such as the Boeing 737 Max crashes, Bryant’s still-mysterious accident on Sunday, and the farcical incompetence shown in a recent fatal FlyNYON helicopter tour crash in New York City, air travel nevertheless operates within a remarkably fragile ecosystem.

Basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, were among the nine people killed in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California on January 26. TSM/Bauer-Griffin Getty Images

This is particularly true with helicopters, which fly much lower to the ground than fixed-wing aircraft, often come in close proximity to buildings, trees, towers, and hills with their massive, high speed turbine-powered rotors whirling furiously above, and don’t have quite the same ability to glide to a safe landing should things go sideways in the air. Because of this, one of the brightest rays of light in aviation at the moment isn’t some big-ticket super jumbo in the pipeline at Boeing or Airbus, but the pending arrival of electric vertical-lift aircraft, which will operate in same realm—urban air mobility—as the Sikorsky S-76 VIP chopper that was shuttling Bryant and his friends across Los Angeles to a children’s basketball league. Known more commonly as air taxis, the aircraft will bring with them a slew of new technologies that will impact aviation safety as much—if not more so—as they do commuting convenience.

The prospects are exhilarating: Passengers will be able to summon an air taxi to their location—a field or landing pad—or meet it at a “vertiport” before zipping through the air with remarkable ease. They’ll fly more efficiently and quietly than conventional helicopters due to their electric propulsion and multi-rotor configurations, which will be engineered to minimize noise. We’re seeing prototypes from Beta Technologies, Joby Aviation, Bell, Lilium, and dozens of others. Some are already flying.

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An electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft from Beta Technologies, executing a fixed-rotor stability test in forward flight.

But it’s the safety element that will be truly game-changing. The new aircraft will have wings to provide supplemental lift and improved glide slopes should there be a power failure; computer-controlled electric motors that can maneuver with exceptional precision in close quarters; autonomous controls that can function as virtual copilots for the humans at the controls, take over if necessary, or even execute complete flights; and new air-traffic management systems that will be fully automated. The system will monitor aircraft, ensure they stay clear of one another, and work with onboard sensing systems to prevent collisions with terrain or objects on the ground.

In fact, I flew an experimental, fully autonomous version of the Sikorsky S-76 involved in Sunday’s crash just last year. When I say “flew,” I mean it literally: I was at the controls without any helicopter experience—though with a test pilot right beside me—controlling the flight from a tablet app and a pair of intuitive hand controls (as seen below). It was easy and simple, and a clear signal of the impact autonomous aviation will have, whether it’s with air taxis or simply serving as a backup wingman for human pilots executing complex missions.

Eric Adams

Furthermore, the electric propulsion systems will use protected batteries that will be engineered to minimize post-crash fires, such as what occurred with Bryant’s crash in California. Though batteries are certainly capable of catching fire, they don’t possess nearly the same energy density as aviation fuel. Helicopter crashes tend to occur at much lower speeds than those of fixed-wing aircraft, thus making fire one of the more deadly components of the events. Take that out of the equation, and throw in new computerized aviation systems designed explicitly for safety, and hops across Los Angeles could potentially become far safer and more routine than they are even today.

This isn’t to say that the future will be entirely crash-proof. All the technologies for electric vertical-lift aviation that are currently in the pipeline are essentially brand-new, and there remains much to be learned. There will be accidents during development, and there will be accidents when they’re put into service. Complex machines, flying through the air with whirling props, will never be safe—just safer—and people will, unfortunately, be injured or killed in the new aircraft.

The likelihood of disaster, however will drop significantly while the convenience, efficiency, and speed of aviation will jump exponentially. We’re on the verge of a new age of aviation that this week we all feel can’t come soon enough.

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