A number of issues appear to have contributed to the fatal runway collision between an Air Canada plane and a fire truck at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport last month, including the stretching of air traffic control resources, according to a preliminary report.
The March 22 crash killed two pilots and sent 40 others to the hospital after an air traffic controller cleared a fire truck to cross a runway where the Air Canada plane was already instructed to land. The report from the National Transportation Safety Board, released Thursday, did not identify a sole cause for the crash, but it did find overlapping issues in the two minutes prior to the collision that potentially contributed to the disaster.
Two people were staffed in the control tower, with one operating as the local controller while the other was operating as both the ground controller and controller-in-charge, according to the report. This was “consistent” with the watch schedule, the NTSB report said.
Prior to the collision, the controller-in-charge was coordinating multiple issues, which included communicating with firefighting crews on the ground, the report said.
The local controller took over transmitting air traffic instructions on both ground control and local controller frequencies at this time, according to the report.
Air Canada’s pilots were given clearance to land by the tower about 21 seconds before firefighting crews left the airport’s fire station area to respond to an emergency. The lead truck attempted to contact the tower 40 seconds after the plane was given clearance to ask to cross the runway, but a simultaneous transmission obscured the call.
A second attempt to reach the the tower was made 34 seconds later. The team in another truck, identified as Truck 1, moved to the front of the convoy of responders to wait at the taxiway intersection.
The trucks were given clearance to drive across the runway, and began to do so less than 30 seconds before the crash. They were instructed to stop for the first time about 20 seconds before the collision, according to the report.
In an interview with investigators, one of the Truck 1 crew members said he heard the words “stop stop stop” on the radio but did not know whom the order was for. He only realized after a second transmission came through that said, “Truck 1 stop stop stop,” but it had already entered the runway.
“He further recalled that as they turned left, he saw the airplane’s lights on the runway,” the report said.
According to the timeline in the report, the second instruction to stop was roughly four seconds before the collision. This was after the plane’s landing gear touched down.
Air Canada’s two pilots, Antoine Forest and Mackenzie Gunther, have been credited with saving the lives of the 72 passengers and the two surviving crew members on the plane.
Jack Cabot, a passenger, told NBC News last month that he could feel the pilots trying to slow down the plane just before the crash.
“I think everybody on that plane feels very grateful that they’re all alive, and they all pretty much give it to the pilots,” Cabot said. “They really just did the best they could.”
Another issue noted in the NTSB report is with a runway safety surveillance system known as ASDE-X, which tracks surface movements of aircraft and vehicles. There was no alert from the system prior to the crash.
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Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the NTSB, previously said that the system was unable to track the vehicles with high confidence because the close proximity of vehicles merging and unmerging near the runway.
None of the ground vehicles were equipped with transponders, the report said.
“As a result, the system was unable to correlate the track of the airplane with the track of Truck 1 (or any of the other vehicles in the group) and did not predict a potential conflict with the landing airplane,” the report said.
Homendy previously said she wasn’t sure if it was common for ground vehicles to have those transponders but that it “would have been helpful.”
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