The wreckage of an Air Canada Express jet that collided with a fire truck at New York's LaGuardia Airport on Monday.Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
U.S. safety investigators are looking at factors such as staffing, fatigue and communication failures in the fatal collision between an Air Canada Express passenger jet and a fire truck on the runway at LaGuardia airport on Sunday night.
Both Canadian pilots, Antoine Forest of Coteau-du-Lac, and Mackenzie Gunther of Ontario, died when their Air Canada Express CRJ 900 carrying 72 passengers and four crew members from Montreal struck the emergency vehicle.
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At a press conference on Tuesday, Jennifer Homendy, chair of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, said the first stages of the investigation found the fire truck did not have a transponder that would have made it visible in the control tower; a radio message from a vehicle to the tower shortly before the fatal crash was indecipherable because it was “stepped on” by another radio user; and the two air traffic controllers were working a midnight shift and performing the jobs of others.
“When something goes wrong that means many, many things went wrong,” Ms. Homendy said. “We’re here to prevent this from happening again.”
Forty-one people were taken to hospital, including two firefighters. One flight attendant, Solange Tremblay, was ejected from the plane still belted in her seat but survived with a broken leg.
Ms. Homendy said the two controllers, expected to be interviewed on Tuesday afternoon, were in charge of vehicles and planes on the apron, as well as aircraft using the runways. This is common practice for midnight shifts but makes for a heavy workload, she said.
The NTSB has raised concerns about fatigue being a factor in past investigations, she said, cautioning the probe is at its early stages. She also questioned why the controllers were not relieved immediately after the crash, and asked if that was because there were no replacements immediately available.
Investigators have yet to fully transcribe the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, which are at the NTSB lab in Washington, D.C.
Joe Capio, a passenger aboard the Air Canada jet, said he was still 'shaken up' and recounted the moments before the crash, which authorities said killed both pilots and injured dozens.
Reuters
At the press conference, NTSB investigator Doug Brazy read out a summary of the final three minutes and seven seconds found on the cockpit voice recorder.
“At one minute and three seconds, an airport vehicle made a radio transmission to the tower, but that transmission was stepped on by another radio transmission, and the source of who made that transmission has yet to be identified,” Mr. Brazy said.
At 20 seconds before the recording ends, the air traffic controller cleared the fire truck to cross the runway, then tells it to stop with eight seconds and then four seconds left. “At zero seconds, the recording ended,” he said.
Ms. Homendy said trucks at other airports have transponders that make them visible on the air traffic control screens. LaGuardia has a ground radar system as well, but the fire trucks and the ones behind it appeared as indistinct blobs, she said.
“So in this case, that vehicle did not have a transponder. And it would have been helpful,” she said, echoing U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s call to upgrade the country’s traffic control systems.
Controllers “have to have information on the ground movements, whether that’s aircraft or vehicles moving on the airport, in taxiways, on runways,” she said. “They should have all the information. This is 2026.”