Air Traffic Control Yelled for Truck to Stop Before Fatal LaGuardia Crash

Safety at Work

New York, NY (WorkersCompensation.com) – One of the crew members in a fire truck that crashed into a commercial freight jet testified that he heard air traffic controllers yelling for the truck to stop.

The new detail is part of the investigation into a crash that killed the two pilots of an Air Canada flight leaving LaGuardia Airport in the early morning on Sunday, March 22.

According to the initial report from the National Transportation Safety Board, the fire truck was at the head of a column of seven rescue vehicles, all of which had previously received clearance from the air traffic control tower to cross Runway 4. The rescue vehicles had been told to head toward a United Airlines flight that was being evacuated because of a strange odor onboard.

However, shortly after allowing the column of vehicles to proceed, air traffic controllers tried to stop them. In a recording from the tower, air traffic controllers can be heard yelling, “Stop, stop, stop, stop. Truck 1, stop, stop, stop. Stop, Truck 1, stop.”

The NTSB report, issued April 23, indicated one of the rescue trucks behind the lead truck saw the Air Canada jet, a Mitsubishi CRJ-900, as it came down the runway they were preparing to cross. That driver also got on the radio to the lead truck and yelled for the truck to stop.

However, the truck continued, investigators said.

Their initial inquiry found that the truck was traveling at around 30 miles an hour and that two seconds after being told to stop, it entered the runway. The driver of the truck turned to the left just moments before it was struck by the jet. Officials estimate the jet was traveling at about 104 miles per hour.

Investigators said the collision between the truck and the jet sheared the cockpit from the aircraft. The crash killed pilots Antoine Forest and Mackenzie Gunther, and seriously injured another crewmember and three passengers. An additional 33 passengers were treated for minor injuries.

The report said the collision crumpled the fire truck and knocked it over on its side. The two crew members, both Port Authority police officers, were seriously injured. The report noted both of the truck’s crew members, the driver and the turret operator, had years of experience and were some hours into their 12-hour shifts.

The turret operator said he heard the tower telling them to stop, but was not able to do anything to prevent the crash.

The report also noted that the two air traffic controllers on duty at the airport, and both of them were up-to-date on their qualifications. One had 18 years of experience and the other had 19 years of experience, and both were less than an hour into their shifts, the report said.

What the report noted most was a concern about the lack of transponders on LaGuardia’s rescue truck fleet. The NTSB said without transponders, the seven emergency services trucks were not visible to the airport’s automated surface detection system (ASDE-X), and because of that the system was not about to alert controllers to the possibility of a crash.

The report said the air traffic controller who allowed the fire truck to cross the runway as the jet approached for landing had been juggling air and ground traffic that night. Without the transponders the air traffic controllers were not automatically alerted that the column of trucks were on a collision course with the plane.

Without the transponders, the “system could not uniquely identify each of the seven responding vehicles or reliably determine their positions, or tracks,” the report said. “As a result, the system was unable to correlate the track of the airplane with the track of Truck 1,” and the truck was hit by the jet as the two vehicles met on the runway. The system, the report said, “did not predict a potential conflict with the landing airplane.”

James Allen, Port Authority spokesman, said the agency was in the process of reviewing the NTSB report.

“We appreciate the NTSB’s work and the speed with which they’ve released this preliminary report,” Allen said in a statement. “We’re conducting a comprehensive review of the initial findings and investigative materials. Our focus is straightforward: ensure our safety procedures and protocols are as strong as they can be and take action to strengthen them as needed.”

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