Pilot safety concerns about New York’s LaGuardia airport were filed to aviation officials months before Sunday’s collision between an airplane and a fire truck left two pilots dead and 41 others injured, according to reports from Nasa’s Aviation Safety Reporting System.
One pilot, writing in the summer, said: “Please do something,” after air traffic controllers failed to provide appropriate guidance about multiple nearby aircraft. “The pace of operations is building in LGA,” they wrote. “The controllers are pushing the line.” In a reference to the January 2025 mid-air collision over the Potomac River in Washington DC that killed more than 60 people, they added: “On thunderstorm days, LGA is starting to feel like [Ronald Reagan National airport] did before the accident there.”
The pilot described a close call where the control tower initiated a takeoff clearance for an aircraft while their plane was “only 300 feet high on final” approach on a different runway. The departing plane hesitated, and the pilot decided to continue landing rather than go around, citing thick haze from Canadian wildfires and a possible helicopter nearby. They noted that “the [air traffic control] guidance … does not seem to give guidance on exactly how close aircraft in this situation can get.”
In another report since January 2025, a pilot said their aircraft was cleared to cross a runway but “we noticed an aircraft we thought was landing at [runway] 31C seemingly headed for us.” They argued that air traffic control “should have sent the aircraft around.”
The fatal crash involved an Air Canada Express flight from Montreal that collided with a fire truck cleared to cross the runway. The controller later said on a recording that he had been “dealing with an emergency earlier” and “messed up”. Aviation expert Brian Fielkow commented: “We did not need another aviation tragedy to see this coming. … We are watching a system under strain.”
