While the Air Canada Express Flight was descending into LGA just before midnight on Sunday, air traffic controllers were dealing with an incident on a separate aircraft.
An incoming United Airlines flight was experiencing an odor in its cabin and declared an emergency on board as some of the flight attendants were feeling ill, according to ATC audio recordings. The plane was asking for a gate to park at to let everyone out just before the collision with a different plane, and a fire truck happened.
The Port Authority fire truck radioed to Air Traffic Control, asking for permission to cross runway 4 to get to the United flight to check on passengers. But while Air Traffic Control could be heard giving the approval to cross, the Air Canada Express flight was descending onto the same runway.
“It is both significant and concerning,” said Michael McCormick, a former VP of the FAA who used to be in charge of the airspace in the New York area.
According to McCormick, there’s usually at least one controller directing ground traffic and at least one controller directing arrivals and departures. That’s not what he heard initially on the audio recordings.
“What we’ve heard from that control tape is it’s the same voice that is clearing the aircraft to land and clearing the vehicles across the runway,” said McCormick. “In a normal tower scenario, it would be ground control working the surface traffic and tower control just working arrivals and departures,” he said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said there was more than one person in the control tower at the time of the collision, but wouldn’t say exactly how many, what they were assigned to, or what they were doing at the time of the collision.
“I’m not going to give the data on that; that’s the arrangement we have with the NTSB,” said Duffy during a press conference.
He said that’s information that’s part of the federal investigation.
It’s not the first time a collision has happened at LaGuardia.
In March of 1997, Eyewitness News was there when a jet collided with a broken-down maintenance truck. The NTSB had said at the time that the control tower cleared the plane to land, even though the vehicle was on the same runway. No one was killed.
Eyewitness News tracked how many times runway incursions are happening. That’s anytime something’s on a runway in the path of a plane that shouldn’t be.
There were more than 1,600 incursions last year. That’s down 7% from the year before. In most cases, there was enough time to avoid an accident, and most cases involved non-commercial aircraft.
As for local airports over the past 5 years, according to the NTSB, LGA had 2 non-fatal collisions, while JFK and EWR each had 3 non-fatal collisions.
“You take more risk getting in an Uber or driving your car to an airport than you take by getting on the aircraft to fly,” said McCormick.
It could take weeks, even months, before the NTSB releases information as to what led to Sunday’s collision.
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