The nation’s top accident investigator warned Tuesday against “pointing the finger at controllers” after a deadly crash between a passenger jet and a fire truck Sunday night at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
Instead, National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy discussed a number of issues involving the truck, operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, including the fact that people in the air traffic control tower could not see it clearly due to a lack of surveillance technology. He said the driver of the truck did not respond to the controller’s order to stop the vehicle before crossing the runway nine seconds before the accident.
The crash of an Air Canada jet on Sunday, which killed two pilots and injured dozens of others, comes a year after the Federal Aviation Administration raised concerns about the strain facing air traffic controllers. Those concerns include the troubling spate of near-collision incidents at airports across the country and the mid-air collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter over the Potomac River last year that killed 67 people.
“I’ve seen several reports from the press about distraction, whether there was any distraction among controllers,” he said. The New York Times reported on Monday that FAA is investigating Had the air traffic controller been distracted by a problem with a different aircraft? “I would caution against pointing the finger at controllers and saying ‘distractions were involved.’ It’s a heavy workload environment.”
Many questions remain unanswered about the crash, Homendy said.
But at several points in the news conference he highlighted issues with tracking the fire truck, which crossed the runway as the jet was landing.
He said the truck did not have a transponder, which would have given controllers the ability to track the vehicle.
LaGuardia is one of dozens of airports across the country where air traffic controllers use Airport Surface Detection System – Model Xknown as ASDE-X, which helps track equipment. “The technology did not trigger an alert due to the merger near the runway and the proximity of the merging vehicles, resulting in the inability to track the incident,” Homendy said.
Homendy said it was unclear whether other trucks following the first truck also had transponders, despite this being a common practice at many high-traffic airports.
Jeff Guzzetti, an aviation safety consultant who was a longtime official at both the NTSB and FAA, said a transponder on the vehicle would have provided additional clarity for controllers. The ASDE-X system “would have picked up fire trucks,” he said, but in case of a crash, “it was just an amorphous blob that wouldn’t have provided anyone the confidence to provide an alert if it had a transponder.”
“It would have had more accurate location information and would have been more clear,” he said.
Many issues are being investigated
Additionally, Homendy said, the fire truck, which was part of a convoy responding to an aborted takeoff elsewhere at the airport, was informed by a controller to stop a full nine seconds before the accident, but continued moving. Homendy said it was unclear whether either of the two workers in the truck, operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, had heard the controller’s warning. He said investigators would attempt to conduct interviews with the workers. Both were seriously injured in the collision.
Even earlier, about a minute before the collision, one of the airport vehicles in the convoy had made a radio broadcast to the tower, but that broadcast stopped due to interference, Homendy said.
Separately, two controllers in the tower were also monitoring ground activity, Homendy said. While it is standard operating procedure for LaGuardia controllers to “perform the duties of other controllers” during slow traffic times at night, Homendy said there was conflicting information about who should watch what.
Officials said 41 people on board the plane were sent to the hospital due to the incident. The aircraft, operated by Jazz Aviation, was carrying a total of 72 passengers and four crew.
The NTSB will investigate a number of issues that led to the accident, including the weather and surrounding visibility in relation to the landing airplane, the movement and visibility of the people in the truck, and what additional techniques, if any, might have prevented the accident from occurring.
Officials with the NTSB, FAA and Transport Canada are investigating.
Aviation Security Summit?
At a separate event Tuesday, Federal Aviation Deputy Administrator Chris Rocheleau said the agency is exploring the possibility of another summit with aviation-related groups, similar to the security stand-down summit it held in 2023, to explore ways to reduce collisions at airports.
He said the summit is something he and FAA Administrator Brian Bedford “are considering with our safety team right now because part of it is making sure we do it at the right time rather than just reacting.”
Rocheleau said the agency is making sure it targets the right mix of experts, including airport ground crew and other operators.
“What we want to do is be very intentional and very thoughtful about who we bring to the table and how we talk about things related to security,” Rocheleau said.
