NY - Air Canada flight hits fire truck on runway at LaGuardia Airport. March 23, 2026

[ch_13]

I am a little confused here. But it sounds like that this "procedure" is a local, LaGuardia rule, not a federal regulation. Is that right? I think NY Port Authority owns/operates LaGuardia, is it their rule?

Obviously there are federal regulations that every all ATC towers need to follow, but every airport is also unique. So there are also local procedures: Staffing levels, runway usage, airspace restrictions, noise-abatement procedures, etc. All of that has to be defined for each airport. It wouldn't make sense for LaGuardia to have to follow the same staffing directives as the airport in say, Fargo, ND.

Even though this is specific to LaGuardia, it wouldn't be a Port Authority rule. ATC is part of the FAA, while the Port Authority is jointly owned by NY & NJ. The PA would not have any say over how the airport tower is staffed. That's under the FAA's purview.


For what it's worth, here's what the NTSB report that's referenced in the article actually says.

(Note: The NOTICE was dated April 16, 1997 and states in part, "in light of recent events, the following procedures will [be] in effect immediately, and will be incorporated in the LaGuardia tower standard operating procedures order. A. The local and ground control positions shall not be combined prior to 0000. B. All vehicles on active runways will be on the local control frequency. C. Whenever a vehicle is cleared onto an active runway, the "VEHICLE" strip shall be placed in the local control flight strip bay for the affected runway. D. During night operations, when the Port Authority is working on the active runway(s), they will request that the runway edge light be turned off.")

(bolded by me)

https://www.baaa-acro.com/sites/default/files/2020-12/N117FJ.pdf

 

[Dotta]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2039793309556646237

 

[ch_13]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2039793309556646237

He stepped away because he was also handling an aircraft's emergency, not for personal reasons. Here's what the article says.

Moments before the crash, ATC heard an emergency call from a United flight reporting a strange 'odor' from its cockpit.

When air traffic control workers took the emergency call, the layout of the control tower meant that a staffer would likely have needed to leave their desk to get to the landline phone across the room, insiders said.


I just wanted to clarify because the headline (perhaps intentionally) gives a different impression. And plenty of people won't bother to read the article.

 

[Dotta]

He stepped away because he was also handling an aircraft's emergency, not for personal reasons. Here's what the article says.

Moments before the crash, ATC heard an emergency call from a United flight reporting a strange 'odor' from its cockpit.

When air traffic control workers took the emergency call, the layout of the control tower meant that a staffer would likely have needed to leave their desk to get to the landline phone across the room, insiders said.


I just wanted to clarify because the headline (perhaps intentionally) gives a different impression. And plenty of people won't bother to read the article.

Nevertheless,
leaving his desk - for whatever reason - proved fatal.
This is a tough job.
Only a few are predisposed to it.
And they shouldn't multitask while working.

JMO

 

[branmuffin]

Nevertheless,
leaving his desk - for whatever reason - proved fatal.
This is a tough job.
Only a few are predisposed to it.
And they shouldn't multitask while working.

JMO

Whose fault would that be? The ATC or the government who thinks airports can get by with less ATCs than what's recommended?

 

[ch_13]

Nevertheless,
leaving his desk - for whatever reason - proved fatal.
This is a tough job.
Only a few are predisposed to it.
And they shouldn't multitask while working.

JMO

We don't know if this was a cause of the crash. You have to read articles, especially those from the Daily Mail, with some skepticism. If you'll notice, they worded this very carefully. They may insinuate this had something to do with the crash, but don't explicitly state it. Nor is there any claim that the controller acted against the regular procedure. We don't even know what "moments before" actually means. Perhaps the landline conversation happened several minutes before. In fact, we heard the controller on the radio talking to the firetruck, both giving them permission to cross the runway and telling them to stop. So, from what I can tell, they were at their normal place during the events of the crash.

And of course, what choice did the controller have? You seem to be suggesting that they should have ignored the ongoing emergency with the second aircraft. Of course they couldn't do that. That was also potentially a life-threatening situation. It needed to be dealt with ASAP.

 

[Dotta]

We don't know if this was a cause of the crash. You have to read articles, especially those from the Daily Mail, with some skepticism. If you'll notice, they worded this very carefully. They may insinuate this had something to do with the crash, but don't explicitly state it. Nor is there any claim that the controller acted against the regular procedure. We don't even know what "moments before" actually means. Perhaps the landline conversation happened several minutes before. In fact, we heard the controller on the radio talking to the firetruck, both giving them permission to cross the runway and telling them to stop. So, from what I can tell, they were at their normal place during the events of the crash.

And of course, what choice did the controller have? You seem to be suggesting that they should have ignored the ongoing emergency with the second aircraft. Of course they couldn't do that. That was also potentially a life-threatening situation. It needed to be dealt with ASAP.

<modsnip>
I'm simply stating a fact that no controller should leave his/her desk multitasking,
running to and fro.
Chaos has no place there.
Focus is needed in this job.
Concentration is vital.
Lives depend on decisions of controllers.

<modsnip>

RIP to Victims of this tragedy

 

[Sundog]

Whose fault would that be? The ATC or the government who thinks airports can get by with less ATCs than what's recommended?

There are strict protocols in the tower for controllers, as there should be. Did the controller follow them? Did the controller break them? The investigation will work to determine how this tragic and deadly accident happened. If the controller is at fault, then we need to know that - no matter how uncomfortable that makes some people feel. The pilots who lost their lives, and their families, need answers, as do we the public.

 

[Sundog]

Focus is needed in this job.
Concentration is vital.
Lives depend on decisions of controllers.

<snipped by me>

Absolutely.

Well said.

 

[branmuffin]

There are strict protocols in the tower for controllers, as there should be. Did the controller follow them? Did the controller break them? The investigation will work to determine how this tragic and deadly accident happened. If the controller is at fault, then we need to know that - no matter how uncomfortable that makes some people feel. The pilots who lost their lives, and their families, need answers, as do we the public.

You are correct. There are strict protocols and one of them is that an air traffic controller shouldn't be doing double duty as the controller in charge AND the duties of the clearance delivery controller. He was dealing with planes that were landing and taking off. Maybe send a strongly worded letter to Sean Duffy to ensure a tragedy like this doesn't happen again.

 

[groupscribe]

Imagine that a truck was given permission to cross the path of a landing US plane in Canada. Imagine that Canada was a country like the US, where employees are forced to work without pay.

Would anyone argue that forcing employees to work without pay did not contribute to communication problems that resulted in fatalities?

Yes. In my opinon, of course there were some complications with the pay and the communities within the workers. This is obviously a classic misconseption. <modsnip: Removed rude, personalizing comment>

 

[Cedars]

You are correct. There are strict protocols and one of them is that an air traffic controller shouldn't be doing double duty as the controller in charge AND the duties of the clearance delivery controller. He was dealing with planes that were landing and taking off. Maybe send a strongly worded letter to Sean Duffy to ensure a tragedy like this doesn't happen again.

It just seems to me an ATC is not working off the top of their head.

Surely there would be a large, constantly changing electronic map of the airport that would show at a glance, in bright colors (red would good) any runway currently assigned to a landing plane. And an unwavering rule that, even in a dire emergency, permission cannot be given to cross a runway unless the mapboard is checked.

Surely no existing emergency is so dire that it over-rides the need to prevent incoming jet planes from crashing?

 

[branmuffin]

It just seems to me an ATC is not working off the top of their head.

Surely there would be a large, constantly changing electronic map of the airport that would show at a glance, in bright colors (red would good) any runway currently assigned to a landing plane. And an unwavering rule that, even in a dire emergency, permission cannot be given to cross a runway unless the mapboard is checked.

Surely no existing emergency is so dire that it over-rides the need to prevent incoming jet planes from crashing?

Is that a rhetorical question? If it is, I'm the wrong person to ask. I will say one thing, I used to work in a ministry that oversaw Emergency Measures in Ontario. It was a think tank that recognized disasters and how to deal with them for the best outcomes in our own environment. One was how to deal with a train derailment with noxious substances - which was very timely because that actually happened in Ontario in 1979 and helped create a seamless recovery of every affected person without any casualties.

Lots of times, it take an actual disaster for rules to be created to avoid this type of accident. It should have already been done after the worst aviation disaster in history when two 747 collided on the runway in the Canary Islands in 1977 killing nearly 600. That's nearly 50 years ago and air travel has ballooned from 14 thousand flights a day to over 100K. It seems that safety measures haven't kept up the pace. ATCs can only juggle so many balls before a disaster happens.

I'm actually surprised how long it took for the FAA to realize that having commercial airplanes and military helicopters sharing the same airspace, like the Washington DC collision, wasn't a good thing. But like anything, a disaster has to occur before regulations are changed.

 

[Dotta]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2047464041702961362

 

[ch_13]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2047464041702961362

Here's a link to the actual preliminary report from the NTSB:

Investigation Report

www.ntsb.gov

A few quotes from the report...

The turret operator in Truck 1 recalled hearing the words “stop stop stop” (on the tower frequency) 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.

Prior to the accident, the GC/CIC [ground controller / controller-in-charge] had been coordinating ground operations with an airplane that had performed two rejected takeoffs, followed by a ground emergency at terminal B, which included communicating with the airplane that declared the emergency, ramp operations, and ARFF. As the GC/CIC continued to coordinate the emergency, the LC [local controller] took over transmitting ATC instructions on both the GC and LC radio frequencies.

Without transponder-equipped vehicles, the ASDE-X system could not uniquely identify each of the seven responding vehicles or reliably determine their positions, or tracks. As a result, the system was unable to correlate the track of the airplane with the track of Truck 1 (or any of the other vehicles in the group) and did not predict a potential conflict with the landing airplane.

The airport was one of the 20 airports equipped with a runway status light (RWSL) system, which provides airplane and ground vehicle operators with a real time warning about potential conflicts at runway/taxiway intersections. It includes RELs [runway entrance lights] installed at most taxiway/runway intersections, which illuminate red to warn taxiway traffic whenever runway traffic is approaching the intersection...A review of airport surveillance video recordings revealed that the RELs illuminated for the arrival of the accident airplane, as Truck 1 and company were stationary in the vicinity of the taxiway AA and taxiway D intersection, about 300 ft away from the runway 4 hold short line on taxiway D. The RELs on taxiway D remained illuminated until about the time Truck 1 reached the (near) edge of runway, when they extinguished, about 3 seconds prior to the collision.

---

The report does answer some of the questions many of us have been wondering about, like what was the other controller doing at the time of the accident. It seems that he or she was dealing with the plane that was experiencing an emergency. And the report may also explain why the truck didn't react when the ground controller yelled "Stop", as they may have thought the transmission was for someone else.

It doesn't yet explain why the truck didn't see the RELs which should have been red.

And of course it doesn't explain why many of the ground vehicles don't have a transponder that allows the ASDE-X system to track them. I'm guessing it may be due to costs, or perhaps the difficulty of retrofitting existing vehicles. Hopefully, after what happened they will focus on equipping all airport vehicles with the transponder.

 

[dotr]

New memorial at Montreal airport honours Canadian pilots killed in LaGuardia crash

A new memorial has been installed at the Montreal-Trudeau International Airport to honour the lives of two Air Canada pilots who were killed in a collision at New York’s LaGuardia Airport last month.

www.cp24.com

April 25, 2026
'A new memorial has been installed at the Montreal-Trudeau International Airport to honour the lives of two Air Canada pilots who were killed in a collision at New York’s LaGuardia Airport last month.

Capt. Antoine Forest, 30, and First Officer Mackenzie Gunther, 24, died in the crash on the runway after colliding with a fire truck that was given clearance to respond to an incident involving another aircraft.'

The memorial for Antoine Forest and Mackenzie Gunther at Jacques-de-Lesseps Park, near the Montreal-Trudeau International Airport. (Aéroports de Montréal)