Stephen Colbert returned to The Late Show last night after having Monday off and took a moment to discuss the tragic death of Kobe Bryant, and his own “strange connection” to the helicopter crash which claimed all nine lives on board.
Colbert was 10-years-old when he lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash. Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 went down in Charlotte on September 11th, 1974 due to heavy fog. Colbert said, “One of the terrible things about that shock and the heartbreaking unreality” is “not knowing what happened.” In the crash that killed his father and brothers, the plane’s “black box” was able to provide answers and was even used to enact new sterile cockpit rules.
He added that helicopters usually do not have “black boxes” and called on the NTSB to “take action to make sure that there are some ways to record what is happening in these helicopters, so that it doesn’t happen so often.”