A cockpit video recovered from Angel City Air’s NewsChopper4 shows the aircraft’s engine speed changing and a warning tone sounding in the seconds before the Airbus AS350 B2 helicopter went down between two commercial buildings in Chatsworth on Sept. 16, 2026. The crash killed reporter Eliana Moreno, 38, pilot George Marciniw, and a bystander on the ground, Edy Gutierrez Mejia, 29, and left two more people injured. National Transportation Safety Board Investigator in Charge Fabian Salazar says the recording is now the clearest evidence investigators have of what happened inside the cabin before the aircraft lost altitude near Nordhoff Street.
The board opened its investigation the morning after the crash, standard procedure for any fatal civil helicopter accident, but a continuous camera feed running through the failure sequence itself is unusual. Most general-aviation crashes leave investigators piecing events together from wreckage and witness accounts alone.
An Airbus AS350 with a history but no data recorder
Federal Aviation Administration records list the helicopter, tail number N358TV, as an Airbus AS350 B2 — the type originally sold as the Eurocopter AS350 — registered to Tiny Bubbles Aviation Inc., an aircraft-holding company in Pacoima. The FAA registry shows a standard airworthiness certificate in the rotorcraft category and no open airworthiness directive tied to the crash. Like most helicopters of its size, it was never required to carry a flight data recorder, so investigators have no automatic stream of rotor speed, engine torque or altitude readings to fall back on, only the audio and video Salazar’s team is now analyzing frame by frame.
Angel City Air, the Van Nuys-based aviation contractor that supplies aircraft and pilots for NBC4 and Telemundo 52’s news coverage, had paired Marciniw with Moreno since 2023, according to MyNewsLA. Marciniw had flown for roughly three decades before the crash, long enough that colleagues at the station described him as inseparable from the NewsChopper4 call sign itself. NBC4 meteorologist Belen De Leon put it plainly afterward: thinking of NewsChopper4 meant thinking of him.
A camera that kept recording through the final descent
NewsChopper4 was hovering over the scene of a fatal collision between a Metro bus and an SUV in the San Fernando Valley when the crash occurred, according to the San Fernando Valley Sun. The onboard camera that had been broadcasting that earlier scene kept running as the engine-speed changes and warning tone registered on the recording, before the helicopter descended into the gap between two buildings at 9151 Mason Ave., near Nordhoff Street, roughly a mile from where the bus crash it had been covering came to rest.
Salazar told reporters investigators plan to send a pristine copy of the audio track to the agency’s recorder laboratory for a sound spectrum analysis, the process used to identify exact frequency signatures rather than rely on what a human ear can pick out of a compressed news feed. That analysis, not the raw video, is what will show whether the changing engine sounds reflect an actual mechanical failure, a pilot response to one, or something else entirely. Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Chief Rico Gross, whose crews responded to the crash site within minutes, has not said publicly whether firefighters saw or heard anything before the aircraft came down.
Three deaths across a Chatsworth parking lot
Moreno, a Chapman University graduate who had reported for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 since 2010, and Marciniw died when the helicopter came down over a storage-business lot just before 7 p.m. Gutierrez Mejia, 29, was killed on the ground, and two other people nearby were hurt. Moreno had told colleagues since childhood that reporting was the only career she wanted, according to family members who spoke publicly after the crash.
None of the three deaths has been formally attributed to a specific mechanical cause. That distinction matters to the NTSB’s process: a cockpit recording can show what happened inside the aircraft without yet explaining why.
A 30-day preliminary report, an 18-month final one
“A preliminary report will be issued in about 30 days, followed by a final report with a probable cause,” Salazar said, according to KESQ, adding that the full determination can take up to about 18 months. That schedule, consistent with how the agency handles most fatal aviation investigations nationwide, puts the first public account of what the engine was doing — short of an official cause — around mid-October, roughly a month after the crash.
Neither the preliminary nor the final report is expected to settle the question on its own. A sound spectrum analysis can identify what an engine or a warning system actually sounded like; it cannot, by itself, say why the sound changed. Until that lab work is done, Salazar’s own framing stands: the recording is evidence to be analyzed, not yet a finding about what failed over Chatsworth.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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