An Athens native reflected Tuesday on the recent helicopter crash that claimed the life of former NBA superstar Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven others.

Sparkle Greenhaw lives in a condominium not far from the crash site. The daughter of the late Jackie Greenhaw and his wife, Helen, Sparkle has lived in California for about four years and works at Pepperdine University.

She said the crash occurred at about 9:45 a.m., but she didn’t hear it. What she saw, however, was the sound of dozens of emergency vehicles and news and emergency helicopters flying overhead. She could also see the impact of the helicopter against the mountainside.

“I could see the crash site in the distance,” she said by phone Tuesday. “I could see the plume of smoke.”

After walking back inside her condo, she turned on the news. A short while later, she began seeing rumors on Twitter that Bryant was on the helicopter, but said that wasn’t confirmed.

“I was very sad to know anyone was killed,” she said.

When Bryant’s death was confirmed, the media vans continued to pour into her neighborhood, as did fans of the former Los Angeles Lakers superstar who is fourth on the NBA list of all-time scorers. Greenhaw said all the traffic has been a drastic change for her normally quiet neighborhood.

Monday night, law enforcement finally reopened the main road in front of her condominium complex.

“There are probably 10 news trucks still located across from the barrier,” she said.

Bryant and the other passengers were heading to Bryant’s Mamba Sports Academy, a youth sports center in Thousand Oaks where Gianna was going to play in a basketball tournament.

Also killed were John Altobelli, 56, longtime head coach of Southern California’s Orange Coast College baseball team; his wife, Keri; and daughter, Alyssa, who played on the same basketball team as Bryant’s daughter; and Christina Mauser, a girls’ basketball coach at a Southern California elementary school.

Greenhaw explained it’s been fascinating to see how Bryant’s death has resonated with Californians.

“People all over the state have been struck by this, especially in the Los Angeles area,” she said, adding fans in Bryant jerseys have been a fixture near the crash site. “Not being from California or following the NBA, I’ve been struck by how much (Bryant) meant to everyone and how much he symbolized.”

Poor conditions

When asked about the conditions that morning, Greenhaw said it was very foggy, but added that’s not unusual for this time of the year. A Tuesday Associated Press story said the veteran pilot had tried to avoid the fog, described as so heavy it grounded police helicopters.

While the investigation into the cause of the crash was just beginning and crews were still working to recover the bodies, experts and armchair pilots alike flooded social media and the airwaves with speculation, some of them suggesting that the pilot had become disoriented in the dense fog that had settled along part of the flight path.

The chartered Sikorsky S-76B was a luxury twin-engine aircraft often used by Bryant in traffic-jumping hops around the notoriously congested L.A. area. It was heading from John Wayne Airport in Orange County to Camarillo Airport in Ventura County when it crashed in Calabasas.

The pilot, Ara Zobayan, was chief pilot for the craft’s owner, Island Express Helicopters. He also was a flight instructor, had more than 8,000 hours of flight time and had flown Bryant and other celebrities several times before, including Kylie Jenner.

Randy Waldman, a helicopter flight instructor who lives in Los Angeles, said the radar tracking data he has seen leads him to believe the pilot got confused in the fog and went into a fatal dive.

“Once you get disoriented your body senses completely tell you the wrong thing. You have no idea which way is up or down,” he said. “If you’re flying visually, if you get caught in a situation where you can’t see out the windshield, the life expectancy of the pilot and the aircraft is maybe 10, 15 seconds.”

Some experts raised questions of whether the helicopter should have even been flying. The weather was so foggy that the Los Angeles Police Department and the county sheriff’s department had grounded their own choppers.

“He could have turned around and gone back to a safer place with better visibility,” Waldman said. However, “a lot of times somebody who’s doing it for a living is pressured to get their client to where they have to go,” he said. “They take chances that maybe they shouldn’t take.”

The helicopter was flying around Burbank, just north of Los Angeles, when the pilot received air traffic control permission to use special visual flight rules, allowing the helicopter to fly in less-than-optimal visibility and weather.

Zobayan was told to follow a freeway and stay at or below 2,500 feet, according to radio traffic. The pilot didn’t seem overly concerned, though at one point he asked air traffic controllers to provide “flight following” guidance but was told the helicopter was too low for that radar assistance.

About four minutes later, the pilot said he was climbing to avoid a cloud layer, Jennifer Homendy of the National Transportation Safety Board said Monday.

It was his last message to air traffic controllers. The helicopter slammed into a hillside and burst into flames.

Hormendy said investigators would look at everything, from the pilot’s history and actions to the condition of the helicopter.

“We look at man, machine and the environment,” she said. “And weather is just a small portion of that.”

Jerry Kidrick, a retired Army colonel who flew helicopters in Iraq and now teaches at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, said the helicopter’s rapid climb and fast descent suggest the pilot was disoriented.

“It’s one of the most dangerous conditions you can be in,” Kidrick said. “Oftentimes, your body is telling you something different than what the instruments are telling you.”

On Monday, NTSB investigators scoured the area to collect evidence, and Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies on horseback patrolled the brushy Calabasas hillside. Homendy said the NTSB expected to be on the scene for five days.

“It was a pretty devastating accident scene,” she said of the widespread wreckage. “A piece of the tail is down the hill. The fuselage is on the other side of that hill. And then the main rotor is about 100 yards beyond that.”

Homendy urged people with photographs of weather in the area at the time of the crash to send them to the NTSB.

— Associated Press reporters Stefanie Dazio, David Koenig and Bernard Condon contributed to this report.