Stephen Colbert feels a "strange connection" to the Kobe Bryant tragedy

The Late Show was off Monday, so Colbert reflected on the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash on his show Tuesday night. Colbert recalled he was 10 years old in 1974 when his father and two older brothers were killed on Eastern Air Lines Flight 212, which crashed in similar heavy fog conditions as the Bryant helicopter that went down Sunday. "I feel a strange connection to his family and his friends and those who loved him and those who’ve gone through this particular tragedy," he said. "Because I lost my father and two of my brothers when I was a boy to a plane crash that was also in heavy fog." Colbert added: "One of the terrible things about that shock and the heartbreaking unreality, nightmare quality of some huge in your life who just disappears, the center of your love disappearing in that moment, is not knowing what happened." Colbert pointed out that thanks to the black box recording on his father's flight, the airline industry was able to enact new sterile cockpit rules. Yet Colbert noted that helicopters like Bryant's usually don't carry black boxes, so it's difficult to learn what caused the crash to prevent future accidents. "I hope that while nothing will possibly improve this tragedy, while nothing will take away this heartache and this pain from this family that will be living with it for the rest of their lives... that 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 so often," Colbert said. "...Why confound their misery about mystery of what happened to their loved ones? It's better to know than not to know because if we know, we could possibly stop this from happening to someone else in the future."

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• Jimmy Kimmel had on Magic Johnson Tuesday to discuss the Kobe Bryant tragedy