Communication Failures Played Role in Deadly Crash at LaGuardia, N.T.S.B. Says [View all]

A series of communications failures — including LaGuardia Airport’s decision not to outfit emergency response vehicles with transponders — were factors in a fatal runway collision between an Air Canada passenger jet and an airport fire truck, according to a preliminary report the National Transportation Safety Board issued on Thursday.

The report states that the air traffic controller who allowed the fire truck to cross the runway even as the jet was approaching for a landing on March 22 had been juggling both air and ground traffic leading up to the collision. And it details how the firefighters driving that truck, the lead vehicle in a convoy responding to an issue with another plane, failed to immediately understand that instructions over the control tower frequency radio to “stop, stop, stop” were meant for them.

But the report focuses in particular on the lack of transponders in the emergency vehicles, which investigators suggested could have allowed an automatic warning system to alert the controller that the plane and the vehicles were on a potential crash course.

Without the transponders, the “system could not uniquely identify each of the seven responding vehicles or reliably determine their positions, or tracks,” investigators wrote in the report. “As a result, the system was unable to correlate the track of the airplane with the track of Truck 1” — the truck that was struck by the plane. Thus, the report added, the system “did not predict a potential conflict with the landing airplane.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/nyregion/laguardia-crash-ntsb-report.html?

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