NEW YORK, March 25 — US officials yesterday played down speculation that distracted air traffic controllers might have contributed to a deadly collision between an Air Canada jet and a fire truck at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
Two pilots were killed in the runway crash late Sunday, which crushed the cockpit of the Bombardier plane and heavily damaged the emergency vehicle.
Media reports said investigators were probing whether airport traffic controllers were distracted by an odour issue on a United Airlines flight — the emergency to which the fire truck was responding.
“I would caution pointing fingers at controllers and saying distraction was involved,” Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters.
“We rarely, if ever, investigate a major accident where it was one failure,” she said.
“Our aviation system is incredibly safe because there are multiple, multiple layers of defense built in to prevent an accident. So when something goes wrong, that means many, many things went wrong,” she said.
Two air traffic controllers were working in LaGuardia’s tower at the time, Homendy said.
In addition to airspace management, the two were doing departure clearances and ground traffic control, tasks typically handled by separate staff.
Homendy said the staffing level was “common practice across the national airspace” for a midnight shift, noting however that her agency had previously raised concerns about fatigue.
“We have no indication that was a factor here, but it is a shift that we have been focused on in past investigations,” she said.
No alert
Homendy added that the runway safety system ASDE-X, designed to track aircraft and ground vehicles, did not generate an alert before the crash because the fire truck was not equipped with a transponder.
The NTSB’s lead investigator Doug Brazy said the board was analysing more than 25 hours of cockpit voice recordings and 80 hours of flight data.
He said the final three minutes captured in the cockpit included the co-pilot transferring control to the captain six seconds before the recording ended. The reason for this was unclear.
Brazy said that air traffic control had cleared the fire truck to cross the runway 20 seconds before the recording ended, before instructing it to stop 11 seconds later.
A passenger list showed 76 people on board the flight, including four crew members, Air Canada said, adding that 39 of those were taken to hospital.
Six people remained hospitalised as of Tuesday afternoon, the airline said.
The two men in the fire truck were also taken to hospital but officials said Monday they were expected to recover.
The collision was LaGuardia’s first fatal accident since 1992.
Located in the borough of Queens, LaGuardia is the third-busiest airport serving New York, handling 32.8 million passengers in 2025, according to port authority figures.
Deadly air crashes in the United States in recent years include a collision between a passenger jet and an army helicopter near Washington in January 2025 that killed 67 people. — AFP
US officials downplay controller ‘odour distraction’ in deadly LaGuardia runway crash
