Tube Explosion: 15 September 2017

It could be as basic as giving the viewer a wider view of the area, rather than a narrow one-view.

Plus, they were flying around in one of the final approaches to the easterly direction runways at Heathrow.

Sophie Raworth clearly lives minutes away from the scene - it's that sort of area. Jill Dando lived, and died, 3 minutes' drive from the scene. Obviously that drive would have to be on a day that the roads aren't all in shutdown with blue and white tape and bald berks holding guns wandering around. I suggest trying around 2am on a typical Tuesday morning. And don't stop at the 24 hour garage for a pie - it'll only slow you down.

I think Sophie did a remarkable job covering events from the scene, let's not forget that a reporter used to doing live reports in those kinds of circumstances would likely have a producer with them fixing up eyewitnesses to interview, trying to get info from the police etc. She was seemingly totally on her own and playing camera op too.

Not a helicopter pilot, but I seem to recall it's either dangerous or fuel inefficient to hover in one spot. Something about the rotors getting caught in the vortex of their own downwash.

I noticed that several of the witnesses work within TV Production as well.

I believe it may be to reduce continuous noise for residents as per British Helicopter Associations guidelines for filming : http://www.britishhelicopterassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/Civil-Helicopter-in-the-Community.pdf

Obviously it won't remove the noise, but it should be less intrusive than a constant hover.

As others have said - hovering is also inherently less fuel efficient and may have a safety implication.

Yes - there are still tours of other BBC buildings - like the operation Media City in Salford, and I believe PQ in Glasgow? These have presumably been suspended due to increased security.

As a further side note the Sky News app's alerts now struggle to fit the text in. One just now about the raid in surrey had armed police in surrey after tube bomi.
Update- Sky just sent a correction through.

Parking spaces are few and far between in the sky.

https://www.flightradar24.com/GTAKE/ee1f002

Helicopter over a Surrey police op right now.

Technically, where is the receiver for the copter? BT Tower? And I assume it tracks the helicopter as it looks like the actual antenna on the heli is just an omni beam.

I think the chopper can work into any conveniently placed SNG truck in the absence of a fixed receive point.

There's no need for the receive point to track the helicopter these days. With something like COFDM the receive points can be omnidirectional too and the signals from several combined to take account of movement