Controller cleared fire truck to cross runway seconds before fatal LaGuardia crash

New York: One of only two air traffic controllers on duty at LaGuardia Airport cleared a fire truck to cross a runway just 12 seconds before an Air Canada flight touched down, leaving little time to avoid the collision that killed the flight’s two pilots, federal investigators have said.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is working to determine which of the airport’s many layers of safety precautions failed, allowing the fire truck onto the runway on Sunday night.

Among the questions being explored are whether the common practice of two controllers on duty overnight is enough, why the runway warning system didn’t alert to the possibility of a crash, who was co-ordinating air and ground traffic, and whether the fire truck heard the controller’s last-second pleas to stop.

NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said they would also investigate why the controller involved in the crash went back to work for a period immediately afterwards.

“We know that that controller was still on duty for several minutes afterwards. Normally, they would be relieved. We have questions about that. Was anybody available to relieve that controller? We don’t know that yet,” Homendy told reporters at a media briefing.

“We rarely, if ever, investigate a major accident where it was one failure,” she said. “When something goes wrong, that means many, many things went wrong.”

According to The New York Times, the two pilots who died were in the early stages of their careers. First officer Mackenzie Gunther graduated in 2023 from the aviation technology program at Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto, while the other pilot, Antoine Forest, 30, had worked for Jazz Aviation, which operated the Air Canada Express plane, since December 2022.

Confirming his death to the paper, Forest’s great aunt Jeannette Gagnier said that Forest was like a grandson to her. Forest’s brother, Cedric Forest, also confirmed his brother’s death on social media and posted an image of them together as children.

Seneca Polytechnic published an online memoriam to Gunther expressing the “deepest condolences to Mr Gunther’s family and friends, and to his former colleagues and professors. He will be deeply missed.”

About 40 people sustained serious injuries in the crash, including two emergency responders, while a flight attendant, still strapped in her seat, survived after being thrown onto the tarmac.

NTSB investigators have not yet interviewed the firefighters, who were also injured, or found whether they braked or turned to avoid the collision, Homendy said.

Two controllers were on duty

Investigators want to know more about the role of the air traffic controllers and what they were doing while juggling a late-night emergency involving another plane – a strong odour reported in the cabin of a departing United Airlines jet.

Homendy warned against jumping to conclusions.

“I would caution against pointing fingers at controllers and saying distraction was involved. This is a heavy-workload environment,” she said.

Having two controllers on duty in the control tower is typical for a late-night shift, but has long been a concern for the NTSB, she said. Both controllers were early in their shift when the crash happened.

The tower at LaGuardia had been busier than expected on Sunday night because delays pushed the number of flight arrivals and departures after 10pm to more than double the scheduled number, according to data from analytics firm Cirium.

Aircraft were landing every few minutes, with a dozen flights arriving between 11pm and when the crash happened less than 40 minutes later. At the same time, the controllers were co-ordinating the emergency response to the United Airlines odour incident, which was making flight attendants feel ill.

Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation safety expert who used to investigate crashes for both the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), said this crash may raise questions about whether having two controllers on the overnight shift is enough at major airports.

That has been the minimum since 2018, when the FAA imposed that requirement after several instances of controllers falling asleep while working solo.

LaGuardia is one of 35 major US airports with an advanced surface surveillance system to help eliminate dangerous runway incursions and prevent crashes.

Controllers in these airports have a display in the tower that’s supposed to show them the location of every plane and vehicle.

The system, known as ASDE-X, didn’t work as intended this time because the fire truck wasn’t outfitted with a transponder, Homendy said. There were also emergency vehicles behind the fire truck that stopped in time, and the proximity of the vehicles merging kept the system from triggering an alarm, she said.

More work is needed to determine whether an alert could have prevented the crash, she said.

Just last May, the FAA urged the 35 airports with surface surveillance systems like LaGuardia’s to equip their vehicles with transponders and said federal funds were available to help pay for them.

While the NTSB hasn’t recommended that vehicles on airport grounds be equipped with transponders, they should be fitted as standard, Homendy said.

“Air traffic controllers should know what’s before them, whether it’s on [the] airport surface or in the airspace. They should have that information to ensure safety,” she said.

Asked about the lack of a transponder in the fire truck, the airport operator, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said it was “unable to comment due to the ongoing investigation”.

The FAA disclosed 97 runway incursions across the US in January, according to the most recently available data posted on its website.

Timeline lays out final seconds

The NTSB laid out a timeline of the final moments after reviewing the Air Canada jet’s cockpit voice recorder, which authorities recovered by cutting a hole in the aircraft’s roof.

Investigators said that 25 seconds before the crash, the fire truck asked to cross the same runway where the plane had already been cleared to land nearly two minutes earlier.

One controller cleared the truck to cross the runway five seconds later, when the plane was a little more than 30 metres from the ground, the NTSB found.

Then, just nine seconds before the two collided, the tower told the fire truck to stop – a second before the plane’s landing gear touched down, the NTSB said. The plane was travelling at about 200 km/h at the point of impact, according to law enforcement sources.

Homendy said it appeared that the airport’s runway status lights were working, which might have warned the fire truck driver not to cross the runway even if the controller approved it.

The lights embedded in the runway surface are designed to automatically turn red when it is occupied to signal to vehicle operators and pilots not to enter.

The controller could also see the vehicles and the plane from the tower window, said John Cox, chief executive of Safety Operating Systems. But there simply may not have been enough time to prevent the crash once the fire truck pulled onto the runway.

Travel delays mount

The crash came at a time of increasing frustration with air travel in the US, caused by long security lines because of the government shutdown, winter storms and rising costs.

While flights resumed on Monday at LaGuardia – the New York region’s third-busiest airport – the runway where the collision happened was still closed.

About one quarter of the airport’s flights were cancelled on Tuesday, according to FlightAware.com, and there were significant delays averaging more than four hours. But it did not appear that cancellations were spilling over to other airports around the US.

AP

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