Eerie cellphone video captured what is believed to be Kobe Bryant’s helicopter “performing a very aggressive circling maneuver’’ a half-hour before it crashed.
The footage is now in the hands of federal aviation probers, David Lyudmirsky, who filmed the aircraft and posted the footage to Twitter, told The Post on Tuesday.
“It’s just unreal,’’ said the 41-year-old dad of three and construction inspector who lives in Glendale, California, along the doomed aircraft’s flight path.
“There’s people all over the world in horrible conditions, suffering, and here’s one of the wealthiest Americans, most celebrated athletes, with a child of his, and families … it’s just a tragedy.”
The 41-year-old NBA legend Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others were killed when their helicopter crashed in Calabasas on Sunday morning.
Lyudmirsky said he went outside his house on an otherwise “quiet’’ Sunday because he heard a noise “as loud as thunder — imagine a gang of bikers — overhead.”
He said he started filming the chopper in the sky because he likes to “have a record’’ of things out of the ordinary, in this case, “a huge helicopter, one that doesn’t ever fly that low, one that never circles, it’s just meant to go from point A to point B,” acting “strange.
“I didn’t think it was in trouble. I just didn’t understand what was going on,’’ the resident said of the helicopter.
He wrote on Twitter, “This pilot was performing a very aggressive circling maneuver … I observed 1 or 2 circles before filming & he was even lower & closer to my house, engine maxed.”
Lyudmirsky added to The Post, “You just never ever see that, ever, [except] at an air show.’’
He said it was the only chopper that went over his house that morning.
Lyudmirsky said he turned over his video footage to the NTSB on Monday night.
Agency spokesman Keith Holloway told The Post on Tuesday, “We have received and [been] notified of a number of videos that are surfacing on the Internet and various other outlets.
“However, we are unable to verify any at this time.”
Additional reporting by Lee Brown
