A firetruck that crossed into the path of a landing Air Canada Express jet at LaGuardia Airport in March lacked a transponder, the basic tracking device that would have triggered an automatic collision warning, and the airport's safety system never sounded an alarm, the National Transportation Safety Board revealed in a preliminary report released Thursday.
Two pilots, Capt. Antoine Forest, 24, and MacKenzie Gunther, 30, died in the crash. Forty other people were hospitalized. The firetruck was completely destroyed. And the report makes clear that a chain of preventable failures, from missing equipment to a controller's fatal clearance, led directly to the disaster.
The findings raise hard questions about the state of ground-safety infrastructure at one of America's busiest airports, and about whether the people responsible for keeping runways safe had the tools or the support to do the job.
The crash happened on a night when seven emergency vehicles left an airport fire station to respond to a United Airlines flight that had reported a strange odor. None of those seven vehicles carried transponders. That meant LaGuardia's ASDE-X surface surveillance system, designed to detect and warn of potential collisions on the ground, was functionally blind to them.
The NTSB report stated the consequences plainly:
"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."
In other words, the airport's automated safety net did not exist that night, not because the technology failed, but because the vehicles were never equipped to work with it.
The Washington Times reported that the firetruck drove through the airport's stop-light-style runway warning system before the collision, and that controllers were dealing with unusually heavy late-night traffic and a separate United Airlines emergency at the same time.
Two air traffic controllers were working the night shift. One was a controller-in-charge with 19 years of experience. The other was a local controller with roughly 18 years on the job. Both were described as being at the start of their careers, a detail that appears to refer to their time at LaGuardia specifically.
The local controller gave the Air Canada flight clearance to land about 20 seconds before the emergency vehicles left the fire station. Then Truck 1 requested permission to cross the same runway to reach the United plane. The local controller cleared it.
At the moment that clearance was given, the Air Canada jet was only 130 feet in the air.
About 20 seconds before impact, the local controller began instructing the truck to stop. A crew member inside the firetruck told the NTSB he recalled hearing the controller pleading with them to stop several times, but said he did not realize the command was meant for his vehicle before it entered the runway.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis pointed to this breakdown in an interview with Newsmax, saying: "It appears that there was a lack of communication or an incorrect communication between air traffic control and that fire truck that was crossing the runway to get to another aircraft where there was smoke."
The NTSB report added a chilling detail about those final seconds. The firetruck crew member recalled seeing the airplane's lights on the runway as the truck turned left, and then the lights went out.
"He further recalled that as they turned left, he saw the airplane's lights on the runway, until about the time Truck 1 reached the (near) edge of the runway, when they extinguished, about three seconds prior to the collision."
The runway's red entrance lights were on as the Air Canada plane reached the runway and stayed lit, until roughly the moment Truck 1 arrived at the runway's edge. Then they went dark, three seconds before the crash.
Forest and Gunther never had a chance. Their bodies have since been repatriated to Canada. Flight attendant Solange Tremblay survived being thrown 330 feet from the crash site while still strapped in her seat. She was among the 40 people hospitalized.
The Washington Examiner reported that the Jazz Aviation flight operating for Air Canada was traveling approximately 130 miles per hour when it struck the Port Authority Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting vehicle on Runway 4 shortly before midnight. Two occupants of the emergency vehicle were also injured.
That a regional jet at landing speed hit a firetruck on an active runway at a major American airport is not a freak accident. It is the predictable result of systems that were not maintained, equipped, or coordinated to prevent exactly this kind of catastrophe.
The NTSB has previously warned about serious collision risks at other U.S. airports, including Hollywood Burbank. LaGuardia now joins a growing list of facilities where the gap between the safety infrastructure that exists on paper and the safety infrastructure that actually functions has proved dangerous, or deadly.
Malliotakis also raised broader concerns about the state of air traffic control at LaGuardia. "Obviously, our first questions are about the staffing at the air traffic control," she said. Newsmax reported that LaGuardia's control tower may have been operating with significantly fewer personnel than intended, with heavy overtime possibly adding fatigue and operational strain.
Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti offered a blunt assessment of the conditions that night: "These controllers were just way busy, just too busy," he told the Washington Times.
Former airline pilot John Cox explained the significance of the runway warning lights the firetruck drove through: "That's an automated system so even though the controller says you're cleared to cross, the lights mean that there's an airplane that is either on the runway or about to be."
So the automated system tried to warn the truck. The controller tried to warn the truck. Neither warning reached the crew in time. And the deeper automated system, ASDE-X, the one designed to catch exactly this scenario before it becomes fatal, never activated at all, because the vehicles it needed to track were invisible to it.
The pattern of aviation safety incidents at U.S. airports has drawn increasing scrutiny. The FAA investigated a near miss between a United Boeing 737 and a Black Hawk helicopter at John Wayne Airport, and fatal crashes have occurred at other facilities, including a deadly runway crash at an Arizona airport.
The preliminary report is exactly that, preliminary. The full investigation is ongoing. But the facts already in the record point to systemic failures, not a single human error.
Why were seven emergency vehicles operating at a major airport without transponders? Who made the decision not to equip them? How long had that gap existed? Was the FAA aware? Was the Port Authority? Did anyone flag the risk before two young pilots paid for it with their lives?
And why was a local controller, however experienced, left in a position where he cleared a firetruck onto an active runway with a jet 130 feet overhead? Was the workload that night manageable? Were there enough people in the tower? These are not rhetorical questions. They demand answers from the agencies responsible.
The NTSB's final report will presumably address these gaps. But the preliminary findings already tell a damning story: an airport where the collision-prevention system could not see the vehicles on the ground, where a controller gave clearance that should never have been given, and where a firetruck crew drove through red warning lights without understanding they were the ones being warned.
Taxpayers fund these systems. Travelers trust them with their lives. The families of Antoine Forest and MacKenzie Gunther deserve to know why every layer of protection failed on the same night, and who will be held accountable for making sure it never happens again.
