Two news helicopters fall after colliding in midair while covering a police pursuit in central Phoenix, Friday, killing everyone on both aircraft, police said. Both helicopters were from local television stations. KNXV-TV Channel 15 reported that one of the choppers belonged to its station. The other chopper was from KTVK Channel 3 in Phoenix. - AP

PHOENIX (AP):

It is an aerial dance familiar to residents of many large cities as television news helicopters share the sky, jockeying to position their cameras for live shots of fires, car chases and other breaking news events.

The TV station pilots take care to coordinate their actions and avoid each other, experts and industry officials say, but two of the aircraft got too close while covering a Phoenix police chase, colliding and killing four people.

Though two collisions involving news helicopters in Japan in 1984 and 1994 killed a total of six people, the president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association said she could not recall another U.S. incident of two news choppers colliding while covering a story.

"These pilots, they are very professional," Barbara Cochran said from Washington. "They combine the skills of pilots and skills as journalists."

"The one thing you don't compromise is safety to be competitive," said Kevin McCutchen, a past president of the National Broadcast Pilots Association and a television news pilot for 11 years in Indianapolis.

On Friday, five news helicopters and one police helicopter were in the air following a truck that police were pursuing through Phoenix.

Some witnesses said one of the TV helicopters appeared to be hovering when a second one turned into it. "They just got sucked into each other, and they both exploded and pieces were flying everywhere," said Rick Gotchie, an air-conditioning contractor who was working nearby.

Federal investigations

They plummeted from a of about 500 feet (150 meters) into a grassy park in the middle of the city and burst into flames. All four people aboard the KNXV-TV and KTVK-TV helicopters - one pilot and one photographer on each - were killed. No one on the ground was injured a piece of one helicopter's rotor blade hit a truck windshield.

Federal investigators will spend several days examining the scene and the helicopters' maintenance records, and will look at whether the pilots followed federal regulations, National Transportation Safety Board member Steve R. Chealander said yesterday.

Complex

"Aviation accidents are very complex and we have to look into every aspect of it, and it is never quite what it seems," said Chealander.

The Federal Aviation Adminis-tration has not had any major safety problems with news chopper operations, said regional spokes-man Ian Gregor in Los Angeles.

Gregor said the pilots of the several helicopters over the Phoenix chase, about five miles (eight kilometers) northwest of the city's airport, were not talking to air traffic controllers.

"Typically, air-traffic controllers clear helicopters into an area where they can cover a chase like this," Gregor said. "Once they are in the area, the pilots themselves are responsible for keeping themselves separated from other aircraft."