Inside Jeff Bezos' Scary Helicopter Crash Experience

Jeff Bezos' fantasy of taking humanity beyond the stars nearly took a tragic turn when he tried making his dreams a reality. Years before Amazon became the conglomerate it is today, Bezos was scouting land to launch his rocket company, Blue Origin. Nowadays, the company has test facilities around the country. But back in 2003, just three years after Bezos founded Blue Origin, the billionaire CEO and mogul was scouting a canyon in West Texas to establish the company's first official launch site.

However, Blue Origin's humble beginnings got off to a rocky start thanks, in large part, to Bezos' impatience. According to Christian Davenport's book "The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos" (via Business Insider), Bezos was warned against taking a helicopter to scout the area. Instead, he was told it'd be safer to investigate the land by horseback. But since the helicopter was quicker, Bezos ignored the advice. 

Bezos and his three passengers parked the helicopter on a mountainous area a bit away from their destination. After surveying it, the passengers would reboard the helicopter before it took off for another flight. But the chopper's tail struck a nearby tree while in the air, sending it crashing into the terrain where it landed upside down. In a 2008 interview with CNN, Bezos theorized that the crash happened partially because of a capacity issue. "We had a full cabin, and a full tank of gas, so the helicopter was heavy," he explained.

Kobe Bryant's and his daughter Gianna Bryant's deaths in a similar helicopter crash show the true danger Bezos and his passengers were in at the time. Remarkably, most on board walked away from the incident with minor injuries. The biggest injury was sustained by Bezos' attorney Elizabeth Korrell, who had to be hospitalized for broken vertebrae. Still, in that situation, a trip to the hospital must've been leaps and bounds better than a trip to the morgue.

The helicopter suffered the worst damage out of all the parties involved. Looking at its mangled body on the website The Smoking Gun, where you can find pictures of the helicopter crash, it's a wonder how the passengers were able to leave the accident with the injuries they had. Even Bezos himself figured he wouldn't make it out alive during the harrowing incident. But funnily enough, he remembered thinking before the helicopter touched the ground, "I thought, what a dumb way to die," he said.

So when he lived through the crash, Bezos couldn't help but let out a hearty laugh at the moment. He also came out of the wreckage with a new perspective on helicopters. "Avoid helicopters whenever possible," he simply said in a 2004 interview with Fast Company.