An audio recording recovered from the Air Canada Express passenger jet that collided with a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport in New York on Sunday night has revealed the mistakes made leading up to the fatal crash. The two pilots on the Jazz Aviation Flight 8646 from Montreal, Captain Antoine Forest and First Officer Mackenzie Gunther, were killed when their plane smashed into the Port Authority truck, which was crossing Runway 4 in response to an emergency issue reported on another aircraft. Forty-one people on board were injured and taken to hospital, most of whom have since been released, as were the two occupants of the vehicle, who were treated for broken limbs and are understood to be in a stable condition.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board recovered the cockpit recording by cutting a hole into the roof of the mangled Bombardier CRJ-900 on Monday, enabling NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy to lay out a detailed timeline of precisely what happened on Tuesday. Homendy’s team said one controller in LaGuardia’s air traffic control tower had granted permission for the vehicle to cross the runway while another had cleared the Canadian flight to land on the same tarmac. Instructions relayed to the vehicle to “stop, stop, stop” – heard on real-time audio from the tower previously released by LiveATC.com – went unacknowledged, leading to the deadly collision at approximately 11.40 p.m.
Officials said it was common practice to have two controllers working the night shift and said LaGuardia has a surveillance system in place to track the movement of planes and vehicles across its site. However, the truck involved was not equipped with a transponder that would have triggered an alert, potentially contributing to the tragedy. Homendy said the controllers involved were working a 10.30 p.m. to 6.30 a.m. shift on which staff have previously reported feeling fatigue, although she added there was “no indication that was a factor here.”
She explained that the cockpit contained 25 hours of audio, which would be fully transcribed on Wednesday, but said its final moments reveal the incoming plane liaising with the control tower, securing permission to use the runway, and clearing its landing checklist. A radio transmission from the truck was lost at this moment, according to Homendy, because another unidentified user was communicating on the same frequency. “That would be significant because it could mean somebody might not hear the other part of the communication,” Homendy said. The truck was duly granted permission to cross Runway 4 with the plane just feet from the ground, leading to the frantic calls for it to stop once the error had been realised – to no avail. “I tried to reach out to ’em… We were dealing with an emergency earlier, and I messed up,” the controller said on the LiveATC audio.
