A series of communications failures — including LaGuardia Airport’s decision not to equip 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 released Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board.
The air traffic controller, who allowed the fire truck to cross the runway even as the jet was coming in for landing on March 22, was controlling both air and ground traffic due to the collision, the report said. And it details how the firefighters driving that truck, the lead vehicle in the convoy responding to a problem with another aircraft, failed to immediately understand that the “stop, stop, stop” instructions over the control tower frequency radio were meant for them.
But the report focuses specifically on the lack of transponders in emergency vehicles, which investigators suggested could have allowed an automated warning system to alert controllers that the plane and vehicle were on a potential crash path.
Without the transponder, “the system could not uniquely identify each of the seven responding vehicles or reliably determine their position or track,” 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 collided with the plane. Thus, the report said, the system “did not predict a potential conflict with the landing airplane.”
The Federal Aviation Administration formally recommended in May 2025 that airports equip their emergency vehicles with such technology to avoid close calls. On Thursday, before the report was released, Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, told reporters that the agency would wait to see the report before making any changes. The Port Authority operates three major airports in the New York area, including LaGuardia.
“We have not made any changes to the equipment at this time,” he said.
The 15-page report offers the most comprehensive presentation ever released by the NTSB detailing the factors that led to the March 22 collision, but it is still preliminary, and the board has not yet reached a conclusion on what caused the crash. Such investigations usually take about a year.
Still, the report begins to answer key questions that arose after the first fatal crash at LaGuardia in more than three decades, including what role air traffic controllers played that night and what people in the fire truck heard before the collision, which killed both pilots of Air Canada Flight 8646 and sent 39 passengers, as well as two firefighters in the truck, to hospital.
About 25 seconds before collision, a firefighter in the truck asked LaGuardia’s air traffic control tower for permission to cross Runway 4, where the Air Canada jet was rapidly approaching as it was about to make its final landing. According to the NTSB report, the controller allowed firefighters to cross when the airplane was only 130 feet above the ground.
Eleven seconds later, the controller realized his mistake, immediately calling the fire truck, “Stop, Truck 1, stop!” But the truck did not stop, and the Air Canada jet hit the runway as the controller uttered his fervent prayer.
Several minutes after the collision, a controller can be heard saying to the other pilot, “I messed up.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
