(NEW YORK) — Two people were in the LaGuardia Airport air traffic control tower cab when an Air Canada jet collided with a Port Authority airport vehicle on a runway at the New York City airport on Sunday night, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
The on-the-ground crash killed both pilots, left dozens injured and prompted LaGuardia to shut down for more than 12 hours. Antoine Forest has been identified by his family as one of the two pilots killed.
The collision happened shortly after Air Canada Flight 8646, which was carrying four crew members and 72 passengers, touched down from Montreal around 11:45 p.m., according to Port Authority Executive Director Kathryn Garcia. The plane, which was operated by Jazz Aviation, struck a rescue-and-firefighting vehicle responding to another aircraft, officials said.
Preliminary data shows the plane was traveling between 93 and 105 mph when it impacted the fire truck, FlightRadar24 told ABC News.
At least 43 people — from the plane and the fire truck — were taken to hospitals, officials said.
As the NTSB investigates the crash, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said there were two people in the air traffic control tower cab at the time of collision: the local controller and the controller in charge.
Two controllers is “the standard operating procedure for LaGuardia for the midnight shift,” Homendy at a news conference on Tuesday.
She said the NTSB has been concerned about fatigue from the midnight shift in past investigations, but stressed that there is no evidence of fatigue so far in this case.
LaGuardia has a runway safety system allowing air traffic controllers to track surface movement of planes and vehicles, but that system “did not alert,” Homendy said.
The analysis found that the system “did not generate an alert due to the close proximity of vehicles merging and unmerging near the runway, resulting in the inability to create a track of high confidence,” Homendy said.
There is no indication yet if the pilots saw the fire truck on the runway, Homendy said, noting that the NTSB is still analyzing the cockpit voice recorder.
Homendy said the NTSB is still working to determine what happened at the air traffic controllers’ shift change around 10:30 p.m.
“We know that that controller was still on duty for several minutes afterwards” the crash, she said, when usually they’d be relieved, so she said the NTSB is investigating if anyone was available to relieve them.
Homendy also stressed that the NTSB “rarely, if ever, investigate[s] a major accident where it was one failure” — usually “many, many things” went wrong, she said.
“Our aviation system is incredibly safe because there are multiple, multiple layers of defense built in to prevent an accident,” she explained.
One passenger on the flight, Joe, said that as the plane was landing, he noticed some emergency vehicles on the tarmac.
“Right before the impacts, we felt something, maybe like an emergency brake that was pulled, or some kind of hard stop, before we hit the truck,” Joe, who did not want to use his last name, told ABC News Live. “But prior to that, there was nothing out of the ordinary that I had noticed.”
“Because I was seated in the emergency aisle, somebody in the plane had shouted, ‘Emergency exits open,'” Joe said. “So at that time, I pulled the lever down, attached the door, put it to the side of the plane, and a few of us had exited through the emergency exit onto the wing of the plane. And FDNY and Port Authority Police directed us to slide down the wing. … It was very low to the ground and easy to get off.”
Joe, who was on the flight with his fiancé, said Monday evening that they were “pretty shaken up, still kind of in shock.”
“And just heartbroken for, obviously, the pilots, and all those that are injured,” Joe said.
He said he believes the pilots “saved many lives on that flight — and my heart’s just broken for them.”
LaGuardia shut down after the crash and slowly resumed flights at 2 p.m. Monday. The runway where the collision occurred will remain closed until 7 a.m. Friday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
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