"You would fly over Monterey Park and you'd see people in the parks doing tai chi, just moving in slow motion," he said. "Sometimes you would get these scents. I flew over a golf course, and you could smell the strong scent of freshly cut grass. Then you would get, say, another mile further and then you would fly over a restaurant, a Denny's, and you would get the smell of bacon that was cooking."
In a metropolitan area of well over 13 million people, spread over a vast landscape from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, the helicopter view of Los Angeles, some suggest, is a uniquely manageable way of looking at the city.
"Whether you are in one or if you are just vicariously looking at footage from one, there's something a little patient about them," said David Kipen, a Los Angeles writer and teacher who last year published "Dear Los Angeles: the City in Diaries and Letters, 1542 to 2018."
"And I guess if they give you the illusion at least of being able to comprehend and embrace the whole city at once, or at least get a little perspective on the place," he said, "then maybe we have a little more secret affection for them than we do for the automobile or the airplane."
Mr. Kipen's book contains a letter by Christopher Isherwood, the novelist and playwright, describing a helicopter ride he took in 1962 with the writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley. "The ease and abruptness of the ascent is like flying in dreams," he wrote. The city below, he wrote, "was shocking in its uniformity; all those roofs and little yards and bug-autos and occasional glittering green pools, so much of it, stretching away and away, you never saw the end of it."
It was a view of Los Angeles that Mr. Bryant had frequently, and it was his last .
In 2010, a writer for GQ accompanied Mr. Bryant on his helicopter, and described the moments after liftoff:
"Bryant squints into the lowering sun, then looks down at all the teeming life below, the sprawling, striving, smog-shouldered city of Los Angeles. His city. From up here he could palm it like a basketball."
Tim Arango, Dave Philipps and Louis Keene reported from Los Angeles, and Julie Bosman from Chicago.
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