The wreckage of an Air Canada Express jet that collided with fire truck at New York's LaGuardia Airport on March 24. The crash killed both pilots.Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
A firefighter in the truck that was hit by a landing Air Canada Express passenger jet on New York’s LaGuardia Airport runway heard a command to stop but did not know who it was for, the U.S. safety investigator says in its preliminary report on the March 22 crash that killed both pilots.
The pilots, Antoine Forest of Coteau-du-Lac, and Mackenzie Gunther of Ontario, died when the Mitsubishi CRJ900 en route from Montreal carrying 72 passengers collided with the truck, which had been cleared by an air traffic controller to cross the runway moments before it was told to halt.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in a report issued on Thursday, said the turret operator in the fire truck heard the command “stop, stop, stop” on the control tower radio “but he did not know who that transmission was intended for.”
“He subsequently heard ‘Truck 1, stop, stop, stop’ and realized it was for them and subsequently noticed that they had entered the runway,” the NTSB report says. “He further recalled that as they turned left, he saw the airplane’s lights on the runway.”
The nose of the plane, operated by Halifax’s Jazz Aviation under contract to Air Canada, was destroyed by the impact. Solange Tremblay, a flight attendant, was thrown far from the site of the crash still secured to her seat and suffered multiple injuries. Thirty-nine people were taken to hospital, six with serious injuries.
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The plane’s last recorded ground speed was 104 miles an hour, the NTSB says.
The NTSB report, which contains no findings of cause or contributing factors, will be followed by a final study within about 18 months.
An image from the preliminary report into the collision of an Air Canada jet and a firefighting truck at LaGuardia Airport. The green circle shows where the ground vehicles initially gathered, the yellow dash line their intended path and the red star indicates where the collision occurred.Supplied
The initial report says the plane was given clearance to land on Runway Four at 11:35 p.m. At around the same time, seven emergency vehicles approached the runway on a taxiway as they prepared to respond to an emergency involving a different plane across the airport.
At 11:36, the air traffic controller gave the trucks clearance to cross.
The air traffic controller then gave taxiing instructions to another aircraft, and immediately told the truck to stop.
At 11:37, the controller repeatedly told the lead truck to stop, but its speed accelerated as it approached the runway crossing.
The collision occurred two seconds after touchdown. The truck turned left just before the collision, while the plane’s rudder was turned to the left just before the end of the flight data recorder, the report said.
The fire trucks did not have transponders that would have made them appear on the tower control screens.
Geraint Harvey, a professor at Western University and an expert in civil aviation, said most safety systems have overlapping safeguards to prevent such tragedies. However, in the LaGuardia crash it appears several problems lined up to allow the crash to happen, including the first plane’s emergency; communications problems; and multiple trucks trying to cross an active runway.
“It’s awful,” Prof. Harvey said. “There’s really nothing the pilots could have done.”
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John Cox, a pilot and chief executive officer of Washington-based aviation consultancy Safety Operating Systems, noted the LaGuardia runway was marked by red lights that signal the presence of a plane. The fire truck passed these red lights after receiving clearance.
“They’re red, but more importantly, they say there is an airplane on the runway or about to be,” he said.
Mr. Cox said it was not clear who the stop commands were issued to, given the air traffic controller had just talked to an aircraft before telling the truck to stop.
“There was ambiguity about who the ‘stop, stop, stop’ was for, and then the controller corrected it and said, ‘truck one, stop, stop, stop,’” Mr. Cox said.
The pilots were on their third and final flight of their shift, the NTSB said.
The first officer on board, Mr. Gunther, graduated from Seneca College in Peterborough, Ont., in 2023 with an Honours Bachelor of Aviation Technology. He was hired by Jazz in April, 2024, and had 718 flight hours.
The captain, Mr. Forest, began at Jazz in 2022 and had 3,560 flight hours.
There were two air traffic controllers in the tower that night, each with 18 or 19 years’ experience.