A few minutes later we switched to the Jersey side, where a disabled vehicle caused rubbernecking to plug the freeway. "That's 'Chopper 2 - With Infrared Camera!'" the pilot and the cameraman mocked in unison.
![wcbs chopper 2 wcbs chopper 2](https://images.radio.com/wcbsam/Dd9dcAXVwAA7502.jpg)
(Not because I was really curious, but more because I wanted to alert them to traffic without acting like I was alerting them to traffic. First there was Chopper 2, pacing us about a mile away. (It wasn't important enough to air, even.) Most of the time we took "beauty shots" - ducks flapping around in a Jersey pond, the sunrise, the city, the traffic, the Dumpster.Īnd we even got to watch some of the competition out patrolling. But it was fun being a part of covering breaking news for once, even though the biggest news we broke was a power line brought down by a truck that had been unloading a Dumpster. As a fixed-wing pilot, I didn't cotton too much to hovering, especially beside really, really tall, pointy buildings with no chance of surviving an autorotation. With my brain reeling from that, we took off and headed into and above Manhattan at about the same time the sun popped up in the east. Who'd ever think that the news might be less than truthful? Chopper 5 and High 5 were the same helicopter! The station had mounted a camera on both sides of the tail, and it used shots from one side for High 5 and the other side for Chopper 5. Strangely enough the Eurocopter A-Star looked like night and day: One side was painted sky blue, the other was jet-black. and drove out to an airfield in New Jersey to go on morning patrol with the crew of Chopper 5.
#Wcbs chopper 2 tv#
Simpson and a white Ford Bronco?Ī little while ago I wanted to go up with one of those TV helicopter crews (mostly to log the time), so on a crisp winter morning with snow on the ground and the wind chill well below zero I left my warm apartment at 4:30 a.m. Things got better for television choppers, though: Along came a new camera, mounted on the airframe and stabilized by gyroscopes.
![wcbs chopper 2 wcbs chopper 2](https://www.ultimateyankees.com/Old%20Stadium%20Demolition%20(2)%20%201%2018%202010.jpg)
It was a match made in heaven: With hundreds, maybe thousands, of square miles to cover, and just as many miles of highways jammed with traffic, a chopper could report live on the scene within a few minutes. And so the first news helicopters found a home on the radio. Those first choppers weren't cheap, but the broadcast foot-age seemed like it: The cameraman had to perch on a skid with the camera on his shoulder, which made the picture shaky and out of focus, what with the vibration from the rotor. LA got its first in 1958, a year after President Eisenhower got his.
![wcbs chopper 2 wcbs chopper 2](https://www.ultimateyankees.com/Old%20Stadium%20Visit%2012%2014%202009%20(69)%20[800x600].jpg)
If Los Angeles wasn't the first city to boast of a news and traffic chopper, then it should have been. Except radio - where they got their broadcasting start. Two! Yes, they're in virtually every television market.
![wcbs chopper 2 wcbs chopper 2](https://www.nydailynews.com/resizer/zn32OBA9eoSVvmuoBaxiBB0rFJ8=/1200x895/top/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com/public/X5NBAUNJOFWAACJJYQCKDX7YDE.jpg)
And even a station in Portland, Oregon, has two choppers. It isn't just New York that has news choppers either. Except no Wagner blaring from loudspeakers. It would resemble a battle scene from Apocalypse Now. Imagine all those choppers taking off at once, covering some sort of police action, usually - with the handcuffed suspect facedown on the ground while New York's finest gather around. Oh, yeah, the Spanish-language Telemundo, Channel 47, advertised its own chopper - which oddly enough looked like one of the NewsCopter 7s (funny, though, the N numbers and colors matched perfectly) - but I couldn't tell if the announcer admitted anything because he spoke in rapid-fire Spanish. And ABC's Channel 7 hyped its two NewsCopter 7s (and two thumbs up for the unique name) while anchorman Bill Butell touted the channel's superior newsgathering capabilities as the pair hovered behind him in the background. Then CBS affiliate Channel 2 started running commercials about its old Chopper 2, now updated with a $200,000 "Infrared Camera." The Fox affiliate, Channel 5, promoted its, um, Chopper 5 along with its look-alike High 5 (one was sky blue, the other jet-black). In 1998 the NBC affiliate, Channel 4, began running commercials showing a tail rotor and windshield, while a voice spoke of a "new Chopper 4." "There's nothing else like it," the voice promised. And they won't let you forget it, either. Every New York City television station has a news chopper.