Tape of Fatal Copter Crash Reveals Little

A recording of the final minutes of radio communications from two police helicopters involved in a fatal collision over Irvine last week indicates that neither pilot saw the other before the crash, authorities said Tuesday.

The tapes, of three communications channels used during a 55-minute-long, high-speed chase of a stolen car in which the helicopters were involved, give no warning of the collision. The crash apparently occurred after one of the helicopters, a Costa Mesa aircraft, handed off the pursuit to the other, from Newport Beach, as the stolen car crossed municipal boundaries.

Costa Mesa Police Chief David L. Snowden said Tuesday that the cause of the collision may never be known.

The collision is marked on the tapes only by a 35-second silence after the final radio transmission from the Newport Beach helicopter as it pursued the stolen car down MacArthur Boulevard and across Bonita Canyon Drive.

National Transportation Safety Board investigator Jim Wall said the tapes proved to be of little help in determining why the collision occurred. “There’s nothing on there to point a finger one way or the other,” Wall said. “We always listen just in case, but there’s really not much there.”

NTSB investigators so far have determined that the Costa Mesa helicopter hit the Newport Beach helicopter from behind and below.

Killed in the crash near the University of California, Irvine, were Costa Mesa Police Officers James David Ketchum and John William (Mike) Libolt, the pilot, and Jeffrey Pollard, a civilian flight instructor who was permitted to ride along. Newport Beach Officers Myles Elsing and Robert Oakley, in the second helicopter, survived the crash.

Vincent William Acosta, 19, who was driving the stolen car that was the object of the chase, has been charged with three counts of second-degree murder.