Is the Pilot/Reporter job "safe"?
Certainly there are many different tasks that helicopters do in which the pilot does more than just fly around with nothing else on his mind. ENG, in which the pilot is also the reporter requires a high level of multi-tasking, yes. But is that level unreasonably high? Can it be done safely? Well, it *is* done all the time, all over the U.S. and has been done for decades.
These particular pilots could easily have flown into mountains, or powerlines or whatever, as legions of their peers have done before them. Pilots lose situational awareness all the time and pay the ultimate price. The fact that these two were reporting on something happening on the ground did not relieve them of the requirement to fly the aircraft and not hit anything.
But the "rolling scene" (i.e. the chase) they were covering was at a cruicial point: The driver of the chased vehicle stopped, got out and switched to another vehicle as the police closed in. The drama! It's easy to see how the pilots would be fixated as they watched what was unfolding and attempted to describe it to their viewers. They were probably dividing their time between the in-ship monitors and actually looking down at the action on the ground. I would be.
Apparently, the two ships involved in the midair were even talking to each other immediately before the crash, "more or less" aware of each other's position. One had just come to a hover; the other was still circling.
I suppose it would have been just as easy and effective to have someone in the studio comment on that action at that point and just let the pilots fly. What more could the pilot see than the anchor on the ground? In this case, the local ABC/15 station anchor was doing nearly as much commenting as the pilot!
It's a tragedy, and there will surely be calls for "changes" of some sort. But truly, none are necessary. We don't need any *more* regulations to tell us how to fly safely.
Then again...refer back to my first paragraph about how this practice of having pilot/reporters dates back decades. Let us remember that safety is not merely the absence of an accident. The fact that there have been pilot/reporters all over the place doing it for a long time without accident does not by itself make it a safe practice. Some will say that such an accident as happened in Phoenix as "inevitable." One pilot on another of these boards - a pilot who's done this very type of work! - called the fact that there haven't been more of these types of accidents "miraculous."
I have done radio traffic-reporting in NYC as pilot/reporter, and I know how easy it is to find yourself looking at the ground more than is prudent. And yes, I've had the near-misses to drive that point home. But I'm not ready to say that pilot/reporters are dangerous. However, this accident in Phoenix is still too fresh for me to form an objective opinion as to whether having a pilot/reporter is really a safe thing.
It's just very, very sad.