Kobe Bryant made decision to move his fatal helicopter flight 45 minutes earlier

Kobe Bryant made the life or death decision to move his fatal helicopter flight 45 minutes earlier – just hours before take off, bombshell crash investigation documents reveal.

The NBA legend asked his personal assistant to reschedule the flight from 9.45am to 9am the night before the January 26 crash so he could watch an earlier basketball game.

Federal investigators say the pilot of the Sikorsky S-76B executive helicopter that crashed and killed nine people was likely disoriented by thick fog – weather which began to clear as the morning developed. 

Bryant’s personal assistant Cate Brady, who has worked for the Bryant family since May 2019, told crash investigators: ‘That particular day, for Sunday, I actually changed the time the night before, probably around 6:00 or 7:00p.m., because Bryant had decided he wanted to go to watch another team play before his game.

‘So it was supposed to be a 9:45 departure, but the night before we changed it to a 9:00a.m. departure.’

The helicopter crashed just before 10am, as video from the scene shows how the thick fog left the hillside barely visible. But 45 minutes later, the fog started to lift and the hillside was more visible. 

The interview transcript is part of a 1,700-page cache of documents released on Wednesday by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is investigating the chopper crash near Los Angeles during thick fog conditions that killed Bryant, his daughter and seven others.

In the February 19 interview with investigators, Brady said the Bryants had never put the helicopter company under pressure to fly in bad weather.

‘Would Kobe or – and his people push back and give you a hard time and send you back to Patti asking, why can’t we fly? Or push to get the flight done?’ Garret Dalton, Director of Operations at Island Express Helicopters, asked Brady in the interview.

‘I don’t want to answer that question because it’s never occurred,’ Brady replied. ‘If there was an issue, I have been Kobe’s assistant for long enough to volunteer to drive him. But we’ve never had that happen, so I don’t know the exact answer to that.’

The company told investigators it has cancelled celebrities’ flights in bad weather before, including for Kylie Jenner and LA Clippers star Kawhi Leonard.

The files also include texts between Bryant’s helicopter pilot Ara Zobayan and his colleagues, showing the pilot dismissing warnings about the poor weather that day.

The night before the flight, the broker arranging the trip warned that ‘weather could be an issue’, but the next morning, about 45 minutes before takeoff, Zobayan texted her and Bryant’s drivers that conditions ‘should be OK’.

But the NTSB report said the experienced pilot likely got disoriented in the thick fog that had descended over Calabasas.

Zobayan radioed air traffic control saying he was climbing to 4,000 ft to break through the clouds, when in fact he was plunging towards a hillside.

‘Calculated apparent angles at this time show that the pilot could have misperceived both pitch and roll angles,’ one of the NTSB reports said. ‘During the final descent the pilot, responding to (air traffic control), stated that they were ”climbing to four thousand”.’

Island Express Vice President Whitney Bagge told investigators they stopped seeing Zobayan on their flight tracker around 9.49am, and began making more and more frantic phone calls.

‘I kept refreshing the tracker praying that it was just broken,’ she said.

Experts used the sound of the helicopter recorded by three video cameras on a baseball field near the crash site to estimate the aircraft’s speed and the pilot’s visibility.

The report estimated that visibility was so poor Zobayan had less than 19 seconds between being able to see the hill and crashing into it.

Though he was an experienced pilot with 8,300 flight hours under his belt, a 2016 pilot record included in NTSB documents shows he had only flown for 75 hours using instruments, as was required in the fog that day.

Investigators interviewed the pilot’s long-time girlfriend Tess Davidson, who recounted his final hours.

Davidson, who works at LA’s Children’s Hospital as a respiratory therapist and was on the flight team there, said she met Zobayan online and had lived with him for seven years.

She described how she missed him getting up on the morning of the accident because he woke up at 6am. She woke just minutes after he crashed into a Calabasas hillside at 184 mph.

‘She woke up around 10am and texted Ara,’ the report said. ‘Her text didn’t go through.’

That weekend the happy couple had lunch together, shopped at Macy’s for pillows and watched a movie.

Davidson said her boyfriend ‘was not facing any stresses in the days prior to the accident’ and ‘was in good health’ according to the summary of her statements written by the NTSB investigators.

She said Zobayan was ‘one of the only people [she] knew that was happy to go to work every day.’

‘She found out about the accident because Garret [Dalton] had called her and told her there was an accident and he was on the way to the scene,’ the report said.

Davidson was interviewed at her home in Huntington Beach on February 2 by three NTSB investigators.

The bereaved girlfriend said Zobayan first became interested in aviation after a chance conversation with a helicopter mechanic he sat next to on a plane when he was emigrating from Lebanon to LA in the 1980s.

Davidson said he did not use prescription medication and the last alcoholic drink he had was months before the crash.

Investigators wrote they were able to repair some of the passengers’ phones found at the crash site, but decided not to access them.

Five iPhones, a Samsung Galaxy, an iPad mini and an Apple Watch were found, and though some were smashed to pieces, two of the phones were fixed. But investigators decided not look for text messages or phone calls made during the flight.

In a statement along with the release of the 1,700 pages of reports in the ‘public docket’, NTSB said the documents do not ‘contain analysis, findings, recommendations, or probable cause determinations.’

‘As such, no conclusions about how or why the crash occurred should be drawn from the information within the docket,’ the Board said. ‘Analysis, findings, recommendations, and probable cause determinations related to the crash will be issued by the NTSB in a final report at a later date.’

The chopper, a 1991 Sikorsky S-76B, was carrying Bryant, his friends and family to a youth basketball game at his academy in Thousand Oaks.

The crash killed everyone on board, including Kobe’s 13-year-old daughter Gianna.

A veteran coach of the Orange Coast College baseball team John Altobelli, 56, died along with his wife Keri, 46, and daughter Alyssa, who was on the Mamba Academy team with Gianna and was also aged 13.

Sarah Chester, 45, her 13-year-old daughter Payton, and one of Bryant’s assistant coaches Christina Mauser, 38, also died.

Bryant’s widow Vanessa filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Island Express and Zobayan’s family the month after the crash.

The legal complaint claimed the pilot had a duty of care to his passengers and was negligent.

‘Although the total specific amount of personal injury damages that Plaintiff seeks is TBD, Kobe Bryant’s future lost earnings equal hundreds of millions of dollars,’ her legal documents said.

In May Zobayan’s brother Berge filed a response saying any negligence was down to the passengers.

‘Any injuries or damages to plaintiffs and/or their decedent was directly caused in full or in part by the negligence or fault of plaintiffs and/or their decedent,’ his filing said.

‘This negligence was a substantial factor in causing their purported damages, for which this answering defendant bears no responsibility.’