Since she was eleven years old, Eliana Moreno wanted exactly one job: television news reporter, by her own account. She spent sixteen years covering Southern California by air as the bilingual journalist known on screen and on social media as "Eli in the Heli." Moreno died on September 15, 2026, at 38, when the NBC4 and Telemundo 52 news helicopter she was reporting from crashed in Chatsworth, California, while she covered a fatal bus and SUV collision from the air.

Moreno grew up in Tustin and graduated from Foothill High School before earning a degree in broadcast journalism and political science from Chapman University's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts in 2010. She spent seven years reporting for Irvine's community television station and, beginning in 2010, flew as an aerial reporter for Angel City Air, the Southern California helicopter news service that eventually put her in the sky for NBC Los Angeles (KNBC) and its Spanish language sister station, Telemundo 52, after years spent covering the region for other local stations. She also held her own helicopter pilot's license, according to NBC Los Angeles.

In 2013, according to her own professional profile, she won an Emmy Award for her work with the KTLA5 News Team, an early marker of a career built on doing more than one job at once. "Eliana was fearless and loved that she was not only reporting, but she was the camera person and editor," said Pete Weitzner, her broadcast journalism professor at Chapman, according to CBS News Los Angeles. Tom Macduff, Irvine's communications manager, remembered her the same way, telling NBC Los Angeles, "She was such a bright light. She came into work every day and wanted to make the best of her time there."

She began flying with pilot George Marciniw in 2023, and the two logged hundreds of hours together covering wildfires, police pursuits and breaking news across the Los Angeles basin from NewsChopper 4, according to NBC News. Marciniw, a flight instructor with more than three decades of flying experience, was also killed in the crash. Colleagues at the station knew Moreno as a steady, generous presence in a high pressure job. "When you have Eliana in the chopper, you know you're in good hands," said Jonathan Gonzalez, a weekend anchor and reporter at NBC Los Angeles. Co-anchor Lynette Romero called her "such a light, such a spark plug," adding that she was "teeny-tiny" but had "the biggest heart."

Off camera, Moreno was engaged to Robert Barrientos, having gotten engaged less than a year before her death, and in May 2026 the couple ran a half marathon together, which she shared with her followers on Instagram. She had five siblings. Her brother, Johan Moreno, wrote after her death, "I will love you to the end of time."

Sixteen years of her aerial reporting survive in the NBC4 and Telemundo 52 archives, in two languages, much of it shot and edited by her own hand. The Emmy she won in 2013 sits on the record beside a pilot's license she rarely mentioned and a decade and a half of breaking news covered from above. Chapman's journalism program, the Irvine newsroom where she started, and the colleagues who flew and worked beside her each said, in the days after she died, that they had lost someone who made a demanding job look like the one she had wanted since she was eleven.