What would TV news be without those infamous shots from above of a major crash, fire or some other hot shot? They're even used as weather shots for a beautiful sunrise over the city. 

But who was the first person to come up with the idea and figure out a way to make it work? Remember, in the old days, TV cameras could weigh a ton, making them difficult to lug around, especially up in the air. Turns out, an engineer named John Silva, who worked for KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, came up with the idea as a way of beating his competition. It was 1958 and it occurred to him as he was driving into work. 

“If we could build a mobile news unit in a helicopter, we could beat them in arriving to the scene, avoiding traffic and getting all the stories before the competition,” Silva told the Television Academy in a 2002 interview.

"In July 1958, a Bell 47G-2 helicopter made the first test trip for the KTLA network, becoming the first of its kind anywhere in the world. By September of that year, Silva’s creation, known as the Telecopter, already had a special segment on the channel’s news program. Before long, every major television network had one. Silva died in 2012, but his invention transformed television forever."

Of course, in L.A., the choppers are also used for what's become something of a state pastime that we rarely see up here - the infamous police chase, practically an everyday event in La La Land.

Eye in the sky: How news helicopters have created a new television genre in Los Angeles