2 Die After Helicopters Collide in Torrance

Two helicopters collided over the Torrance municipal airport and crashed Thursday, killing both men in one chopper and injuring the pilot of the other, officials said.

Witnesses said the two aircraft, both built by Robinson Helicopter Co., which is based at the airport, were maneuvering over Zamperini Field at 3:30 p.m. when the accident occurred.

“I heard one loud bang, and then another bang,” said Scott Newman, an executive at Rolling Hills Aviation, an aircraft service center and rental agency at the airport. Newman said he ran outside.

“One of the helicopters was sitting on the south runway, lots of fire,” he said. “The other was in a cornfield on the north side [of that runway]. The man in that one got out and that person was walking around.”

The two men killed were aboard the Robinson R-44 helicopter, owned by the manufacturer, that crashed and burned on Runway 29 Left, officials said. They said the other man, who was flying a smaller Robinson R-22 owned by a private party, was hospitalized at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center near Torrance, where he was reported in stable condition.

The men’s names were not released.

Donn Walker, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the collision occurred 150 feet to 200 feet over the runway as the Robinson R-44 was coming in to land and the smaller helicopter was lifting off.

The cornfield in which the smaller chopper came down is between the airport’s parallel runways, 29 Left and 29 Right.

Walker said the precise circumstances surrounding the crash were not immediately clear, but Zamperini Field, situated just north of and parallel to Pacific Coast Highway, is equipped with a control tower, and controllers were monitoring traffic over the field when the crash occurred.

Robinson Helicopter declined to comment on the crash, saying it was too early to determine what had happened.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which will conduct an investigation to determine the cause of the accident, closed the airport after the crash. The field is not expected to reopen until sometime this afternoon, after the NTSB has studied and removed the wreckage.

The last major accident at Zamperini Field occurred in 1997, when a single-engine plane crashed into a medical building beside the airport seconds after takeoff, killing all four on board. No one was in the building when the crash occurred.