The National Transportation Safety Board has raised staffing and procedural concerns after an Air Canada Express regional jet struck a Port Authority fire truck at LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night, killing two pilots.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said two air traffic controllers were in the tower when the collision occurred and at least one was handling multiple duties. She cautioned against assigning blame to individual controllers, calling LaGuardia’s high workload a systemic problem.
Investigators say a local controller — responsible for active runways and nearby airspace — and the controller in charge, who oversees overall operations and safety, were on duty. The controller in charge also was acting as clearance delivery, the position that issues departure clearances. The NTSB has received conflicting accounts about whether either controller was simultaneously serving as ground controller, who directs vehicles on taxiways.
Homendy noted the tower staff has long raised concerns about the midnight shift. While fatigue has figured in prior probes, officials said there is no current indication that fatigue played a role in this accident.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said LaGuardia is not severely understaffed: the airport’s target is 37 controllers, 33 were on hand, and seven were in training.
The NTSB recovered the cockpit voice recorder and summarized the final three minutes of the flight. As the aircraft approached, the crew ran the landing checklist and received altitude and approach alerts. An unidentified vehicle transmission on the radio was “stepped on” — interrupted — by another transmission. Firefighters on a truck had radioed the tower to request crossing the runway while responding to reports of fumes from a United Airlines plane; controllers granted that request.
Controllers issued a stop command to the truck about nine seconds before the cockpit recording ended, but the truck did not have a transponder. LaGuardia’s Airport Surface Detection System Model X (ASDE-X) can track surface movements, but it did not generate an alert in this case. The NTSB technical center reported the system failed to form a high-confidence track because vehicles were merging and unmerging near the runway.
The NTSB timeline from the recording shows the plane appeared to touch down about eight seconds before the recording ended; roughly six seconds out the first officer transferred control to the captain; and about four seconds before the end controllers again told the firefighters to stop.
Investigators say many questions remain: who made the transmission that was stepped on; whether the firefighters heard the stop commands; whether the pilots saw the truck; if there was any confusion in the cockpit; and why a controller stayed on duty after the crash. Homendy emphasized that major accidents rarely stem from a single error and that multiple layers of defense failed here. The investigation is ongoing, and preliminary findings may change as more evidence is reviewed.