Fire truck ‘stop, stop, stop’ before fatal LaGuardia crash but didn’t know their warning: NTSB
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The National Transportation Safety Board has released its first report on the horrific crash involving an Air Canada plane and a fire truck at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, which it says failed communications and the truck’s lack of transponders played a role in the collision.
The report, released on Thursday, said the truck driver heard commands to “stop, stop, stop” on the radio, but did not know that the message was meant for them.
After the first warning, the fire truck operator heard the controller say, “Truck 1, stop, stop, stop,” and realized that the warning was for his crew. At that time, the report said, the truck was already on Runway 4 as Air Canada Express Flight 8646 landed.
The plane and the truck collided just seconds after the plane was hit. Pilots Mackenzie Gunther and Antoine Forest were killed, 33 were injured, including six seriously.
Captain Antoine Forest, one of two pilots who died when their plane collided with a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport in New York City in March, was remembered during a visitation in his hometown of Coteau-du-Lac, Que., on Friday.
According to air traffic control, Flight 8646 was cleared to land on Runway 4 at 11:35 pm.
About two minutes later – and 25 seconds before the crash – firefighters asked to cross the same road, which is between the airport’s fire station and the area where the United Airlines plane was parked.
Online radio alerts from the accident capture an the air traffic controller says “stop” at least 10 times while immediately telling the fire truck not to cross the runway. The NTSB’s preliminary report on Thursday summarizes interviews with firefighters.
Another factor in the crash was that the emergency vehicles at LaGuardia did not have transponders as part of LaGuardia’s facial recognition system, known as ASDE-X. The system is designed to prevent runway collisions by creating a display that air traffic controllers can use to track the movement of every aircraft and vehicle in real time.
The system provides a visual and audible warning when it detects a potential collision, giving regulators time to intervene, but no alarm went off on the night of the crash.
None of the seven emergency vehicles in the area were equipped with transponders, the report said. They were detected as radar targets, but the ASD-X system could not get a reliable read of their locations to predict a collision course because the vehicles were too close together and merging.
“As a result, the system was unable to correlate the trajectory of the aircraft with the trajectory of Truck 1 (or other vehicles in the group) and did not predict a possible collision with the aircraft,” the report read.
