US safety agency says tracking system failed in LaGuardia collision between Air Canada jet and truck

NEW YORK/MONTREAL - The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said on March 24 that a system which would have allowed a New York airport controller to track movement of aircraft and vehicles did not alert during a night-time collision on March 22 between an Air Canada commercial jet and a truck that killed two pilots.

The NTSB, an independent safety agency, is leading the investigation into the fatal collision of the Air Canada Express CRJ-900 jet with a firetruck at LaGuardia Airport.

The flight, operated by regional partner Jazz Aviation, had 72 passengers and four crew.

The truck, which was on its way to assist another plane that had reported an emergency, crossed the runway just nine seconds before the crash, according to the plane’s cockpit voice recorder.

“ASDE-X 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,” NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters in New York.

ASDE-X - or the Airport Surface Detection Equipment Model X - is a surveillance system designed to help reduce runway incursions that allows air traffic controllers to track surface movement of aircraft and vehicles.

Truck lacked transponder

Ms Homendy also said the truck did not have a transponder, unlike similar vehicles at other airports in the US.

The Federal Aviation Administration has encouraged airports to equip firetrucks with transponders because it makes the vehicles’ movement easier to track at busy airports.

She said it is unclear if an alerting technology would have prevented the incident since it happened so fast.

Air crashes typically are caused by multiple factors, with the investigation’s goal to improve aviation safety and not assign blame.

US air safety experts have said communications between the plane that was landing, the controller and the trucks would be key areas of the investigation.

The collision has raised questions about the controller’s workload and staffing at the busy New York airport.

The NTSB, which has sounded the alarm about close calls and runway incursions for years, in February found the deadly January 2025 mid-air collision of an American Airlines regional jet and an Army helicopter was caused in part because the high workload “degraded controller performance and situation awareness”.

Ms Homendy said the tower had standard staffing for a Sunday night. She added that there were two controllers working in a glass-enclosed section of the airport’s traffic control tower.

Ms Homendy said on March 24 that the NTSB will interview the local controller who started at 10.45pm ET after a shift change 15 minutes earlier and whose interactions with different planes and the truck were heard on liveatc.net. A separate controller in charge was providing clearances for departing aircraft.

It is not clear who was conducting the duties of ground controller, or assigning directions to airport vehicles.

Air traffic controllers make the decisions about when planes can land and take off, and when ground vehicles can enter runways. The controller who made the call for the Air Canada flight to land had been trying to find a gate for a separate United Airlines flight that complained of a bad odor, according to the recording.

The incident has raised questions about whether the controller was distracted by the United Airlines flight, which had declared an emergency.

“I would caution pointing fingers at controllers and saying distraction was involved,” she said. “This is a heavy workload environment.” REUTERS