A year ago,
today, the world lost one of its most beloved sporting icons as a tragic
helicopter crash claimed the lives of Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter
Gianna and seven other people on board.

While the
cause of the accident has so far continued to remain a mystery, it may soon be unraveled,
with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) slated to hold a meeting
next month to determine the probable cause, according to a report in New York
Post.

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Anthony
Brickhouse, a former NTSB official, had told the Post on Monday that determining
“the ‘probable cause’ is not assigning blame, it is more the most likely
scenario that caused the accident”.

The NTSB
has ruled out engine and mechanical failure and released over 1,800 pages of
evidence collected during the investigation in May.

“What the
NTSB does is they take all that data and they analyse it. They look into the
human element, they look into the machine, so the actual helicopter, and they
look into the environment in which the helicopter was actually operating,”
Brickhouse said.

He said that
so far, he hasn’t seen anything to indicate a mechanical failure with the
chopper, which has led the investigation to focus on the human and the
environmental element.

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“You piece
that puzzle back together. You crunch that information. That’s what we’re going
to get on the 9th of February,” he said about the day of the hearing.

Heading to
his Mamba Sports Academy for a youth basketball tournament, Bryant, 41 and his 13-year-old
daughter, along with six others, took off in a twin-engine Sikorsky S-76B from
the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California on January 26, 2020.

The other
passengers were assistant basketball coach Christina Mauser, Sarah Chester and
her daughter Payton, baseball coach John Altobelli and his wife, Keri, and
daughter, Alyssa.

About 15 minutes
after taking off at around 9:06 am, pilot Ara Zobayan requested permission from
Burbank Airport air traffic controllers to enter its airspace. After circling
the airport for 11 minutes due to air traffic, the helicopter was granted
permission to enter its airspace.

At 9:44 am,
the pilot informed he was “climbing” to 4,000 feet to avoid a cloud layer.
However, the chopper climbed a little, before suddenly banking left and rapidly
descending.

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The NTSB says
that the pilot “could have misperceived both pitch and roll angles,” becoming
spatially disoriented and sensing the chopper was climbing when it actually
wasn’t.

“When a
pilot misperceives altitude and acceleration it is known as the ‘somatogravic
illusion’ and can cause spatial disorientation,” its report said.

The
helicopter had a strong flight record, with Bryant having flown in it multiple
times, including after his farewell game with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2016.

It, however, it did not have a black box or a flight recorder, along with not
having TAWS, a terrain-awareness system that alerts the pilot when flying too
close to ground.