Kobe Bryant killed in S76 crash

[Musician]

I'd like to thank everyone who answered my questions about the engine noise on the doorbell video. My takeaway of the answers is that there is no clear sign of a malfunction, and while some people had different ideas of various symptoms that might be audible, there was never any other pilot who would back that up, which to me feels that it isn't indicated clearly enough in the recording to be relied upon.

I have to admit that I haven't paid any attention to the news media, and what any witnesses they found reported on what the machine sounds like, mostly because the average person doesn't even know what it's supposed to sound like. But here, we had an opportunity to have a group of people listen to that sound who do know, and I now feel fairly certain that there isn't anything in there that could be heard (and especially not by any witness who would have only heard it once, and who would not have had the prescience to know a crash was imminent). If there was, several pilots would have noticed it.

To be extra clear, there still could have been some sort of failure aboard the aircraft; all I'm saying is that we can't decide that from the audio. The NTSB is investigating.

(An analysis I thought I could do is to quantify the Doppler effect, i.e. the reduction in pitch of the audible noise (not of the aircraft! this is about sound frequencies, not attitude) as the helicopter passes the recording location that result from the change of the helicopter moving towards the microphone and then away from it; since n5296s found out where the camera is, this could corroborate the speed and flight path of the helicopter with a little applied geometry and physics. But it seems like a lot of effort for very little gain; I'm certain the NTSB has access to experts who have experience with this, and who can throw more advanced methods at this data, so at this point I'm just going to wait for their preliminary report.)