Stephen Colbert took some time to  Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna “Gigi” Bryant, in a helicopter crash on Sunday. After speaking with the bandleader  The Late Show, Jon Batiste, on Tuesday about his own response to the news, Stephen discusses the “strange connection” he feels to the tragedy, which resulted in the deaths both Kobe and Gigi, as well as seven others by the names  John Altobelli, Keri Altobelli, Alyssa Altobelli, Christina Mauser, Sarah Chester, Payton Chester and Ara Zobayan. Stephen shares how he can identify with the pain that the loved ones these victims must feel, as he lost his father and two his brothers in a plane crash when he was young.

“I lost my father and two my brothers when I was a boy to a plane crash that was also in heavy fog,” Stephen explains. “One the terrible things about that shock and the heartbreaking unreality, nightmare quality someone huge in your life who just disappears, the centre your love disappearing in that moment, is not knowing what happened.” He then goes on to discuss  A pilot named Choppy, whose father died in a plane crash and son died in a helicopter crash, explained to Stephen that a major flaw in helicopters is that they don’t have black boxes. “I think it’s crazy that helicopters don’t have black box recorders,” Stephen notes, “because as Choppy explained to me, when a helicopter goes down we don’t know how to improve the helicopter. We don’t know how to improve the flying the pilots so this won’t happen again in the future.”

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“While nothing will possibly improve this tragedy, while nothing will take away this heartache and this pain from this family,” Colbert says, “…perhaps someone could take action to make sure that there are some ways to record what is happening in these helicopters so that it doesn’t happen as ten.” Fellow late night hosts Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, James Corden, and Conan O’Brien all