A Republic Airways crew approaching LaGuardia Airport on March 15 radioed the wrong control tower, reaching controllers at John F. Kennedy International Airport, roughly 10 miles away, while the aircraft was on a two-mile final for the runway, the New York Post reported.
The flight, Delta Connection 5752 out of Washington, D.C., never received landing clearance from LaGuardia Tower. It initiated a go-around after the mix-up and eventually landed without incident, a Republic Airways spokesperson told the Post. But the confusion captured in air traffic control audio, obtained by CBS News, raises fresh questions about cockpit procedures at one of the busiest airport corridors in the country.
The incident happened exactly one week before Air Canada Express Flight 8646 crashed into a Port Authority truck on LaGuardia's Runway 4, killing two pilots and injuring 41 others. Two serious safety events at the same airport in seven days ought to command attention from every traveler and every regulator in the system.
In the recording obtained by CBS News, the Republic Airways pilot opened by hailing what he believed was LaGuardia Tower: "Brickyard 5752, LaGuardia Tower." The voice that came back belonged to a JFK controller: "Brickyard 5752. I'm sorry, where are you?"
The pilot responded, "2-mile final, Brickyard 5752." The controller pressed: "2-mile final where?" When the pilot answered "Runway 4," the controller asked, "At LaGuardia?" The pilot confirmed: "Yes, ma'am."
Then the correction: "This is Kennedy Tower, please go to LaGuardia Tower." The pilot's reaction was audible: "Oh my goodness. Alright." Another pilot listening on the frequency summed it up in two words: "That's crazy."
That exchange is worth reading twice. A commercial aircraft loaded with passengers was two miles from touchdown at LaGuardia, and neither pilot in the cockpit had noticed they were talking to a tower ten miles south at JFK. Without landing clearance from the correct facility, the aircraft had no confirmed separation from other traffic on or near that runway.
Robert Sumwalt, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board and a career airline pilot, told CBS News the mistake was unlike anything he had encountered in decades of flying.
"If the airplane would have landed at LaGuardia without receiving landing clearance, it would have been a very bad mistake."
Sumwalt added context that underscored how unusual the lapse was. He flew for 31 years, spent 24 of those as an airline pilot, and said he had "not heard of this particular error occurring." His instinct was not to assign blame but to extract a lesson: "We want to learn from it, so we can keep it from happening again."
That measured tone is appropriate for a safety investigation. But the public deserves more than a learning exercise. They deserve answers about why two professional pilots on a routine approach to one of the nation's most familiar airports were on the wrong radio frequency in the first place.
Republic Airways, which operated the flight under the Delta Connection brand, confirmed through a spokesperson that the crew initiated a go-around after the slip-up and landed at LaGuardia without incident. Delta Airlines, for its part, confirmed that its own flight crew was not aboard the aircraft, distancing itself from the error while acknowledging the flight carried its branding.
Neither statement addressed the root cause. Neither explained what procedural safeguard failed. The public was left with a reassurance that the plane landed safely and little else.
That gap matters. Regional carriers like Republic Airways operate a large share of the short-haul flights that feed major airline networks. When passengers book a Delta ticket from Washington to New York, most don't know a different company's pilots are flying the plane. The growing scrutiny of controller workload at LaGuardia adds another layer of concern: if the system on the ground is strained, mistakes in the cockpit become even more dangerous.
The March 15 radio mix-up did not occur in isolation. The deadly Air Canada Express crash on LaGuardia's Runway 4 followed just one week later, an event in which an air traffic controller cleared both a plane and a fire truck onto the same runway. That disaster killed two pilots and injured dozens.
Separately, AP News reported that on May 6, another Republic Airways jet at LaGuardia had to abort takeoff and brake hard because a United Airlines plane was still taxiing across the runway. Tower audio captured the controller saying, "Sorry, I thought United had cleared well before that." The FAA and NTSB are investigating that incident as well. LaGuardia has the FAA's advanced ASDS-X surface radar system, yet the near-collision still occurred.
Each of these events, taken alone, might be dismissed as an isolated human error. Taken together, they paint a picture of a system operating with dangerously thin margins, at an airport that handles thousands of operations a day in some of the most congested airspace on Earth.
The FAA's investigation of a near-miss between a United Boeing 737 and a Black Hawk helicopter at John Wayne Airport shows the problem is not confined to New York. But New York's tightly packed airports, LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark within a few miles of each other, make frequency confusion and runway incursions especially high-stakes.
No one has publicly explained how the Republic Airways pilots ended up on JFK's frequency while on final approach to LaGuardia. Was it a mis-tuned radio? A missed handoff? A checklist step skipped under time pressure? The Step 1 package identifies no FAA or NTSB statement on this specific incident, and no formal investigation has been publicly announced for the March 15 radio error.
The names of the pilots have not been released. The exact time of the incident on March 15 has not been disclosed. And neither Republic Airways nor Delta has said whether any internal review or disciplinary action followed.
Passengers on that flight, and on every flight that uses New York's crowded airspace, deserve transparency. Survivors of the Air Canada crash have spoken publicly about the terror of being aboard a plane when the system fails. The people on Delta Connection 5752 may not know how close they came to a far worse outcome.
Aviation safety in the United States remains the best in the world by most statistical measures. But statistics are cold comfort when the margin between a safe landing and a catastrophe is a confused controller asking, "2-mile final where?"
The traveling public does not need another round of corporate statements assuring them that everything turned out fine. They need regulators and airlines to explain what went wrong, what systemic weaknesses allowed it, and what concrete changes will prevent it from happening again, at LaGuardia, at JFK, and at every airport where overtaxed controllers and hurried cockpit crews operate in airspace that leaves no room for error.
When the system works, nobody notices. When it fails, people die. The March 15 mix-up ended safely. The one a week later did not. Luck is not a safety protocol.
