At first, the helicopter was doing what it had done countless times before — circling above Los Angeles as a breaking-news story unfolded below.

The crew of NewsChopper4 had taken to the skies Tuesday evening to provide aerial coverage of a deadly collision involving a Metro bus and an SUV in Chatsworth, a community in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.

It was routine work for an experienced aerial reporting team.

But within minutes, the assignment became a tragedy.

The helicopter suddenly appeared to lose altitude. Video recorded from inside the aircraft showed the camera shaking as the aircraft descended rapidly. Then came a brief exchange between aerial reporter Eliana Moreno and the pilot, George Marciniw.

Among the final words attributed to Moreno were a question that has since taken on a haunting significance:

“What? You can’t pull up?”

Moments later, the helicopter crashed.

Moreno, 38, and Marciniw were killed in the crash, along with a third person on the ground. Two other people were hospitalized.

The fatal accident happened shortly before 7 p.m. Tuesday, September 15, in the 9100 block of North Mason Avenue in Chatsworth. The helicopter came down between commercial buildings and erupted into flames, damaging vehicles and nearby property.

The crash has left colleagues, viewers and members of the Southern California journalism community mourning a reporter whose voice had become closely associated with breaking news from above Los Angeles.

A routine assignment turns deadly

The day had already been marked by tragedy in Chatsworth.

Earlier Tuesday afternoon, a Metro bus and an SUV collided near the intersection of Nordhoff Street and De Soto Avenue. The collision was reported shortly after 5 p.m. and resulted in multiple deaths and injuries.

The SUV ended up partially inside the bus, prompting firefighters to respond to the scene to rescue people who were trapped.

As television stations began covering the developing story, several news helicopters took to the skies.

NewsChopper4, operated by Angel City Air, launched from a nearby airport at about 5:20 p.m. Moreno and Marciniw were aboard to provide aerial coverage for NBC4 and Telemundo 52.

For aerial journalists, the work often involves maintaining a careful position above a breaking-news scene while simultaneously communicating with the newsroom and monitoring changing conditions around the aircraft.

That Tuesday evening assignment began like many others.

Then, shortly before 7 p.m., contact with the helicopter was lost.

Witnesses on the ground described seeing the aircraft behaving strangely before it went down.

One witness said the helicopter appeared to be “swaying” before gradually losing altitude.

He said he noticed something was wrong and watched as the helicopter continued descending.

Seconds later, it disappeared from his view behind buildings.

Then came an enormous burst of smoke and fire.

“It was just this huge puff of smoke and fire,” the witness recalled.

Firefighters rushed toward the scene as flames spread around the crash site.

The final moments

What happened during the helicopter’s final moments remains one of the central questions of the investigation.

Video recorded inside the helicopter reportedly shows the aircraft becoming unstable. The camera shakes as the helicopter loses altitude, creating a chaotic picture of the final seconds before impact.

It is during those moments that Moreno can reportedly be heard speaking to Marciniw.

“What? You can’t pull up?”

The exchange has drawn widespread attention because it captures the apparent urgency inside the aircraft just before the crash.

However, the precise meaning and context of the words cannot be determined from the brief exchange alone.

Investigators will have to establish what the helicopter was doing, what its systems were showing, what communications took place, and whether mechanical, operational, environmental or other factors contributed to the loss of altitude.

At this stage, officials have not determined the cause.

The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the crash. Investigators are expected to examine the wreckage, flight data, maintenance records, operational information and other evidence as they work to reconstruct the aircraft’s final moments.

That means the dramatic footage and final words may provide clues, but they do not by themselves establish why the helicopter crashed.

A newsroom suddenly facing its own tragedy

Inside the NBC4 newsroom, the situation became particularly painful.

The station had been reporting on the crash while its own helicopter was missing.

At first, journalists knew only that a news helicopter had gone down and that contact had been lost.

Then came the confirmation no newsroom wants to receive.

Veteran NBC4 anchor Colleen Williams was on the air when she told viewers that the aircraft was, in fact, NewsChopper4.

The emotional weight of the revelation was unmistakable.

“We are coming on the air with heavy hearts tonight because we lost valued friends and colleagues just before 7 p.m. News Chopper 4 crashed in Chatsworth while on assignment tonight,” Williams said during the station’s coverage.

The station had spent the evening trying to piece together what had happened.

Now the story had changed completely.

It was no longer simply a breaking-news event happening somewhere else in Los Angeles.

It was a tragedy involving their own colleagues.

NBC4 and Telemundo 52 later released a joint statement expressing their grief.

“We are deeply saddened to share that a helicopter providing aerial news coverage for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 was involved in a fatal accident in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening,” the stations said.

“We extend our heartfelt condolences to the families, friends and colleagues of those who lost their lives.”

Remembering Eliana Moreno

For Southern California viewers, Moreno was a familiar presence in the sky.

She had spent years working in aerial journalism and had become associated with the distinctive role of reporting stories from a helicopter as they unfolded on the ground.

Born in Orange County, Moreno graduated from Chapman University in 2010 with degrees in broadcast journalism and political science.

That same year, she joined the Angel City Air helicopter team.

Over the following years, she worked with several Southern California television stations before becoming an aerial reporter for NBC4 and Telemundo 52.

Her career was unusual even within television news.

While many reporters move from one newsroom to another, Moreno built her professional identity around a specialized form of journalism that required her to work in the air, often covering some of the biggest and most chaotic stories in the Los Angeles area.

She had previously described aerial journalism as “the best job in the world.”

The phrase now carries a painful poignancy.

For Moreno, flying above Los Angeles was not simply a workplace assignment. It was a career she had dreamed about since childhood.

Her colleagues remembered her as a respected journalist and a familiar voice during major breaking-news events.

The images she helped bring to viewers were often the first indication of what was happening on freeways, at crime scenes, during fires or during other major emergencies.

From thousands of feet above the city, aerial reporters can provide a perspective that is impossible to obtain from the ground.

But that perspective comes with risks.

Aerial news crews operate in an environment where conditions can change quickly and where a seemingly routine assignment can become dangerous within seconds.

Pilot George Marciniw

Moreno was not alone aboard the helicopter.

Pilot George Marciniw, also an employee of Angel City Air, was killed in the crash.

Marciniw grew up in Southern California and graduated from Burbank High School in 1974.

He and Moreno had been flying together since 2023.

Their professional partnership meant they had spent years working together in the demanding environment of aerial news coverage.

On Tuesday evening, that partnership ended in tragedy.

The helicopter they were operating, known as NewsChopper4, was being used to provide aerial images of the deadly Metro bus collision when it crashed.

The aircraft came down in a parking area near commercial and storage businesses on North Mason Avenue.

The impact sparked a major fire.

Four cars and two storage containers were damaged.

More than 70 firefighters responded as emergency crews worked to control the blaze and search the wreckage.

Because the helicopter was so badly destroyed by the impact and fire, identifying the aircraft and determining how many people had been aboard initially presented challenges for emergency crews.

A third person killed on the ground

The crash did not only claim the lives of the two people aboard the helicopter.

A third person on the ground was also killed.

That victim was identified as 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia.

Two additional people were hospitalized following the crash.

The deaths added another layer of tragedy to a day that had already seen fatalities in the earlier Metro bus and SUV collision.

The two crashes occurred only a short distance apart and within the same community, turning what began as a breaking-news assignment into an extraordinary sequence of disasters.

What investigators will be looking for

The investigation into the helicopter crash is only beginning.

The NTSB and FAA will be tasked with determining what caused the aircraft to lose altitude and ultimately strike the ground.

Investigators typically examine numerous possible factors in an aviation accident, including the aircraft’s mechanical condition, maintenance history, pilot actions, weather, flight path, communications, air traffic information and operational procedures.

They will also examine any available recordings and data that can help reconstruct the final moments.

The footage from inside the helicopter could prove important because it may provide investigators with information about what the crew saw and heard immediately before the crash.

But it is important to distinguish evidence from conclusions.

The fact that the aircraft appeared to descend rapidly does not, by itself, establish whether the descent was caused by a mechanical problem, loss of power, pilot control issue or another factor.

Likewise, Moreno’s reported final question to the pilot does not establish what had happened to the helicopter.

Those answers will have to come from the investigation.

A painful loss for Los Angeles journalism

The crash has also reopened memories of the risks faced by television helicopter crews in Southern California.

Nearly 50 years ago, KNBC Telecopter reporter Francis Gary Powers and cameraman George Spears were killed in a helicopter crash while covering brush fires near the Sepulveda Dam.

The Chatsworth crash therefore joins a long and difficult history of aerial journalism in Los Angeles.

For viewers, helicopter coverage can sometimes feel almost routine.

A familiar aircraft appears overhead.

A reporter’s voice comes through the television.

The camera shows highways, buildings, emergency vehicles and crowds from a perspective that cannot be replicated from the ground.

But behind those images are pilots, reporters, photographers and other professionals working in a complex aviation environment.

On Tuesday night, that familiar presence disappeared from the Los Angeles skyline.

The questions that remain

The most haunting element of the crash may remain the brief sequence captured during the helicopter’s final moments.

The aircraft was in the sky doing the job Moreno had spent much of her professional life doing.

A breaking story was unfolding below.

She and Marciniw were there to show viewers what was happening.

Then the helicopter began descending.

A witness saw it swaying.

The aircraft disappeared behind buildings.

And moments later, a fireball erupted in a Chatsworth parking area.

“What? You can’t pull up?”

Those reported words have become a painful reminder of how quickly an ordinary assignment can turn into an emergency.

But the larger story is not simply about the final seconds.

It is about a journalist who spent more than a decade working in aerial news coverage, a pilot who had flown alongside her for years, and the families, friends and colleagues now left to mourn them.

Moreno’s voice had become part of the soundscape of breaking news in Southern California.

For years, she brought viewers images from above Los Angeles, often arriving at scenes before many people on the ground could understand the scale of what was happening.

On Tuesday, she became part of the story herself.

As investigators begin the difficult process of determining what happened to NewsChopper4, the final answer may take time.

For now, the crash leaves behind grief, unanswered questions and the memory of two professionals who went to work expecting another evening of aerial journalism — and never made it home.