Simply put, yes. Sounds like it.
He had to get special permission from ATC or FAA
Police choppers weren’t flying. They thought it was too dangerous. But that doesn’t mean you can’t fly.
One of the biggest decisions made was to fly VFR instead of IFR. Flying VFR, meant he shouldn’t have gone into the clouds. Because he was reliant on being able to see the ground. Flying IFR adds a longer duration to the trip. They may have been in a bit of a race against time to make the game in time and had enough confidence in himself(the pilot) to fly IFR in those conditions.
But at low altitude over Calabasas, Bryant’s pilot also had another problem. He knew that the ground ahead was rising, and he couldn’t see it. To avoid hitting it, he could keep climbing, and hope that he’d gain altitude faster than the ground underneath him. Or he could slow to a stop and descend vertically until he popped out of the bottom of the cloud. Based on the subsequent track of the aircraft, however, it seems that the pilot decided to take a third option. According to data transmitted by its transponder, at 15 seconds past 9:45 a.m. the pilot banked to the left, then dove. Why? We can never get into his head to know for sure. But based on my own experience flying light aircraft, the sudden intensification of danger creates of sense of mental overload in which it’s nearly impossible to rationally weigh one’s various options. Instead, one takes the most immediate and obvious choice. In this case, that meant trying to get back into clear air by diving back under the cloud layer while pulling a hard 180 to retreat from the dangerous terrain.
Eighteen seconds after beginning the turn, the helicopter had lost 800 feet and returned to an easterly heading. But what the pilot had failed to reckon with is that the ground rose not only straight ahead, but on the sides as well. The S-76B had impacted a hillside above the Los Virgenes Municipal Water District facility at a speed of 170 mph.
To be clear, this scenario is just one possibility. “I can’t stress enough, we do not know what happened,” said Cline. It’s possible, he acknowledges, that the plane suddenly developed a mechanical problem that forced it down. Still, he can’t help but be haunted by the idea that if Bryant’s pilot had decided to fly IFR, he and his passengers would still be alive.
