Fire truck heard ‘stop, stop, stop’ before fatal LaGuardia crash but didn’t know it was 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.
A report issued 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.
The driver of the fire truck then heard the controller say, “Truck 1, stop, stop, stop,” and realized that the warning was for their vehicle. At that time, the report said, the truck was already on Runway 4 as Air Canada Express Flight 8646 landed.
Pilots Mackenzie Gunther and Antoine Forest died when the plane collided with a truck just seconds after the plane crashed. More than 30 people 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.
The NTSB’s preliminary report Thursday summarizes interviews with firefighters and other personnel, providing a complete set of crash results so far. This document did not include formal recommendations, as the final report is not yet complete.
Greg Feith, a former NTSB air safety investigator, said he can understand why a firefighter might be momentarily confused by the first command to “stop, stop, stop.”
“Of course, that raises the question: ‘Is that mine? Is that ours? Who was he talking to, the truck or the plane?’ That, I think, still needs to be clarified,” Feith told CBC News. “Words have meaning and you have to be very specific and instructive [as an air traffic controller].”
Emergency vehicles did not have transponders for automatic warnings
Another contributing factor to the crash was that the emergency vehicles at LaGuardia did not have transponders as part of the airport’s area screening program, 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 ASDE-X system could not get a reliable reading of their locations to predict a collision course because the vehicles were coming together too closely.
“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.
The Federal Aviation Administration recommended that airports with ASDE-X programs voluntarily equip their emergency vehicles with transponders to improve airport safety last May. The Canada Transportation Safety Board (TSB) has been addressing the risk of collisions caused by runway encroachment, defined as the improper presence of a vehicle, person or aircraft in a designated takeoff or landing area, for more than 15 years.
The La Guardia was also equipped with red runway condition lights, which illuminate to alert pilots when the runway is not clear for use. The original NTSB report said the lights were on when the Air Canada plane landed and stayed on “until Truck 1 came (near) the curb, when they went off, about 3 seconds before impact.”
According to air traffic control, Flight 8646 was allowed to land on Runway 4 at 11:35 pm Firefighters requested to cross the same runway about two minutes later – 25 seconds before the accident.
Radio alerts, available online since the crash, capture air traffic control saying “stop” at least 10 times to try to tell the fire truck not to cross the runway.
After the plane crashed, the pilot could be heard saying, “I messed up.”
Tower staff were ‘compliant’ with standard practice, the findings said
There were two qualified controllers with 37 years of combined experience in the tower at the time, the NTSB was “in compliance” with the planning procedures. They were the local controller, in charge of the active runways and the immediate airspace surrounding the airport, and the executive controller, who was responsible for the safety of all operations.
NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy acknowledged last month that staffing has been a concern of the air traffic control team for years, mainly because of the heavy workload. He said the staff’s decisions will be part of the investigation.
The FAA has long faced a chronic shortage of air traffic controllers, workers who work regular overtime and six-day weeks. In the report, the NTSB said the controllers who were in the tower on the night of the accident were both less than an hour apart when they took turns.
