Mapping the Air Canada Crash at LaGuardia Airport NewYork

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:05]On the night of March 22nd, 2026, a Bombardia CRJ900 was on final approach to runway 4 at LaGuardia Airport in New York. The approach was stable. The instruments were clean. The crew had completed their landing checklist. Everything about this flight was routine. And then in the final seconds before touchdown, the pilots saw something on the runway ahead of them. Something that should not have been there.

[00:00:35]>> An Air Canada jet hit a fire truck on the runway.

[00:00:38]>> Put an airport fire truck onto a runway directly into the path of a landing airliner with 76 people on board.

[00:00:45]>> We begin with breaking news out of New York City where a plane landing at LaGuardia Airport crashed into a firet truck.

[00:00:53]This is the story of Air Canada Express flight 8646.

[00:01:08]Air Canada Express Flight 8646 was a regularly scheduled overnight service from Montreal to New York. The aircraft was a Bombardier CRJ900 operated by Jazz Aviation on behalf of Air Canada. The flight should have departed at 8:30 p.m. It did not. Delays pushed the departure back again and again. The flight was over booked. Air Canada offered passengers $1,000 to take the next one, and some took it.

[00:01:43]72 passengers and four crew members stayed on board. The aircraft finally pushed back from the gate at Montreal Trudeau at 10:12 p.m. Eastern, more than 2 hours behind schedule. In the left seat was Captain Antoine Forest. He was 30 years old from Cotto Dulac, a small city in southwestern Quebec. He had spent years working his way through regional aviation to earn that seat. His family said he had been chasing this since he was a teenager. He never stopped flying. He never stopped learning. In the right seat was first officer McKenzie Gunther. He was 38 from Peterbrra, Ontario. He had graduated from Senica Polytenics aviation technology program in 2023 and joined Jazz Aviation right after. Flight 8646 was part of what was still a very new career. These two men were about to fly 72 people through the darkness to New York. A flight that should have ended with a taxi to the gate and a walk through the terminal. But it would not end that way.

[00:02:55]LaGuardia Airport sits on the northern shore of Queens, New York. Two runways, roughly 30 million passengers a year.

[00:03:03]The FAA rates its tower complexity at 11 out of 12, one step below the most complex airspace in the country. The runways are short by commercial standards. The approaches are tight. The margins between safe and catastrophic are razor thin every single day. During the day, a full crew of controllers manages every moving object on the surface and in the air. At night, the operation scales down. Fewer flights, fewer controllers. The assumption is that fewer aircraft means less risk.

[00:03:39]That assumption is wrong, and this crash proves it. Since 2018, the FAA has required a minimum of two controllers on the midnight shift at airports like LaGuardia. That rule exists because before it, controllers had been found asleep while working alone during midnight shifts at multiple airports across the country. two people minimum.

[00:04:03]That way, one could catch the other's mistakes.

[00:04:07]On the night of March 22nd, two controllers were in the tower. One was the local controller responsible for active runways and surrounding airspace.

[00:04:17]The other was the controller in charge, overseeing all safety operations. But between them, they were combining multiple positions, including ground control. Ground control is the position responsible for managing all vehicle and aircraft movement on the taxiways. The person in that seat is supposed to know where every vehicle on the airfield is at all times. On a full daytime shift, that is a dedicated position held by a dedicated person. On this midnight shift, it was being absorbed into someone else's workload. The NTSB later found conflicting information about which of the two controllers was actually performing ground control duties. Even the tower's own records could not clearly answer that question.

[00:05:08]That means one person was simultaneously responsible for what was happening on the runways and what was moving around them. And right around 11:20 p.m. that person's workload was about to spike. A United Airlines flight on the ground at Laaguardia had just declared an emergency. The crew had aborted their takeoff twice due to anti- ice warning lights, then reported a foul odor filling the cabin. Flight attendants were feeling sick. There was no open gate available. The aircraft was stuck on the airfield with nowhere to go.

[00:05:43]The controller dispatched Port Authority Truck 1, an aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicle to assist. These vehicles weigh roughly 35 tons. They are designed to operate on active runways during emergencies, which means they need to get anywhere on the airfield quickly. Inside was Sergeant Michael Osillo and Officer Adrien Bayz. The truck, followed by additional ARF units, began rolling across the airfield toward the stranded United aircraft. To reach the United Jet, the truck would need to cross runway 4 at taxiway Delta. That crossing required a clearance from the tower. The controller would need to confirm no aircraft was landing or departing before giving permission to cross. That sounds simple. In practice, at midnight, while managing an emergency and combining multiple controller positions, it becomes the kind of task where a single lapse in awareness can be fatal. At the exact same time, flight 8646 was descending through the darkness toward that same runway. The crew had been cleared to land. They had no reason to expect anything on the runway surface. Two timelines converging on the same strip of concrete. Neither crew knew about the other, but someone in that tower was supposed to know about both. What follows comes directly from the NTSB's preliminary readout of the cockpit voice recorder. At 3 minutes and 7 seconds before the end of the recording, the approach controller instructed flight 8646 to contact LaGuardia Tower. At 2 minutes and 22 seconds, the crew checked in. At 2 minutes and 17 seconds, the tower cleared them to land on runway 4.

[00:07:34]Nothing unusual, a routine clearance on a quiet night. At 1 minute and 12 seconds, the crew confirmed they had completed the landing checklist. Gear down, flaps set, stable approach. The runway lights at Laguadia were visible through the windshield ahead. But at 1 minute and 35 seconds, something happened that the pilots had no way of knowing about. An airport vehicle transmitted a radio call to the tower at the exact same moment someone else transmitted on the same frequency. In aviation, this is called being stepped on. The two signals collided. The result was a garbled or completely inaudible message. The controller may never have heard it. The NTSB has not identified who made the interfering call. We still do not know what the vehicle was trying to say. At 36 seconds, the radio altimeter called 500 ft. The crew acknowledged and then came the transmission that changed everything.

[00:08:37]>> Truck one and company tower requested to cross four at Delta.

[00:08:41]>> Truck one company cross for Delta.

[00:08:44]>> Truck one and company crossing for at Delta. At 20 seconds before the end of the recording, the tower controller cleared truck 1 and its accompanying vehicles to cross runway 4 at taxiway delta. The controller cleared a 35tonon fire truck to cross the runway that an aircraft had been cleared to land on just 2 minutes earlier. The aircraft was now 12 seconds from touching down, less than a/4 mile from the runway threshold.

[00:09:13]At that distance and speed, there is nothing the pilots can do. You cannot go around. You cannot pull up in time. The aircraft is committed to landing. The truck acknowledged the clearance. It began rolling across the active runway and then the controller saw what he had done.

[00:09:31]>> Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Truck. Stop.

[00:09:32]Stop. Stop. Stop. Truck one. Stop.

[00:09:36]>> 10 stop commands in a matter of seconds.

[00:09:39]9 seconds between the first stop call and the collision. No response from the truck. At 6 seconds before the end of the recording, the first officer transferred control to the captain. On the CRJ900, there is only one nose wheel tiller located on the captain's side. It provides 70° of steering authority. The first officer's rudder pedals provide only about 7°. If Captain Forest saw the truck and needed to steer the aircraft away from it, he was the only person in that cockpit who could do it. The flight data shows the aircraft deviating to the right of the runway center line immediately before the intersection with taxiway delta. At approximately 11:40 p.m., Air Canada Express Flight 8646 struck Port Authority truck 1 on runway 4 at LaGuardia Airport. Flight radar 24 estimated the aircraft's speed at approximately 105 mph at the moment of impact. The CRJ900 has a typical touchdown speed of around 130 to 140 mph.

[00:10:54]The fact that the speed had dropped to 105 means the pilots were already breaking hard. Passengers confirmed this. Multiple people on board described extremely aggressive braking the moment the wheels touched the runway. That was not a normal deceleration. That was an emergency response. Photographs of the wreckage showed the thrust reversers deployed. None of it was enough. The cockpit and the entire forward section of the aircraft were destroyed instantly. The nose gear collapsed. The fuselage tore open forward of the passenger cabin. Captain Antoine Forest and First Officer McKenzie Gunther were killed on impact. Behind them, 72 passengers were thrown violently forward. The cabin erupted into screaming. There were no announcements, no instructions from the cockpit because the cockpit no longer existed. One passenger described what happened inside the cabin. We went down for a regular landing. We came in pretty hard. We immediately hit something and it was just chaos in there. Everybody was hunkered down and everybody was screaming. We didn't have any directions because the pilot's cabin had been destroyed. Flight attendant Salange Tremble was found outside the aircraft, still strapped into her jump seat. The seat had been ejected through a hole torn in the fuselage floor. Her daughter later said she was thrown more than 100 m from the aircraft. She was alive. Her daughter called it a miracle. The passengers took evacuation into their own hands. They tore open emergency exits, jumped from the wings, and turned around to catch other survivors coming behind them. Passenger Rebecca Lori later said the pilots are the reason she made it home safe. 41 people were taken to hospitals across New York. Sergeant Osillo and Officer Bayz were hospitalized in stable condition. Nine passengers remained under medical care the following day. Forest and Gunther did not come home. This was not one mistake. This was a cascade of failures across multiple safety systems. every single one of which was specifically designed to prevent this exact scenario.

[00:13:15]ASD-X is installed at 35 of the busiest airports in the United States. It fuses data from radar transponder multilateration and ADSB broadcasts to give controllers a realtime picture of every aircraft and vehicle on the airport surface. When it detects a conflict, it issues a visual and audible alert. On the night of March 22nd, no alert was issued. Truck one did not have a transponder. Without one, the system relied entirely on radar returns, but the truck was moving with other ARF vehicles close behind it. The close proximity of those vehicles meant the system could not create a high confidence track. No high confidence track, no alert.

[00:14:05]And none of the fire trucks at LaGuardia had transponders. Not just truck one.

[00:14:11]None of them. Just 10 months before this crash in May 2025, the FAA had urged all 35 ASD X airports to voluntarily equip their vehicles with ADSB transponders.

[00:14:26]Over 2,100 vehicles at airports across the country had already been equipped.

[00:14:31]LaGuardia's fire trucks were not among them. The blocked transmission at 1 minute and 35 seconds before impact remains one of the biggest unknowns. If that was the truck trying to communicate its position, the controller never heard it. A critical piece of information may have been lost at the worst possible moment. The NTSB found conflicting information about who was performing ground controller duties that night.

[00:14:58]LaGuardia's tower target is 37 controllers. It had 33. The number of controllers across the country has dropped 6% in the last decade. The FAA estimates the system needs at least 3,000 more. A DOT inspector general audit from March 2025 found the FAA failed to implement all recommendations from a safety review team and lacked the ability to adequately assess runway safety risk. This is not even the first major aviation safety failure in 14 months. In January 2025, an Army Blackhawk helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet collided over the PTOAC River near Reagan National Airport.

[00:15:47]67 people were killed. Transportation Secretary Sha Duffy pledged to fix staffing and upgrade equipment. 14 months later, two more pilots are dead.

[00:15:59]The staffing has not been fixed. The equipment has not been upgraded. The fire trucks still do not have transponders. Approximately 18 minutes after the collision, a Frontier Airlines pilot on the frequency said it was not good to watch. The controller responded.

[00:16:17]He said they had been dealing with an emergency earlier. He said he messed up.

[00:16:22]>> Yeah, I know. I was here. I tried to reach out to my stuff and we were dealing with an emergency earlier. I messed up.

[00:16:29]>> That controller was not careless. He was not negligent. He was a human being managing an active emergency, a reduced crew, and multiple positions simultaneously.

[00:16:41]He made a mistake, and the system around him was designed in a way that made that mistake possible. The controllers involved were not relieved from duty for approximately 20 minutes after the crash. The NTSB is investigating why.

[00:16:57]NTSB chair Homy said it plainly, "Controllers should have all the information and tools they need to do their job. This is 2026."

[00:17:09]The FAA issued an immediate ground stop.

[00:17:13]LaGuardia was shut down. More than 60 flights were cancelled. A separate incident at Newark involving smoke in the air traffic control tower triggered a ground stop there as well. The entire New York metropolitan airspace was in crisis simultaneously.

[00:17:30]LaGuardia did not reopen until 200 p.m.

[00:17:33]the following day, 14 hours after the collision. New York Governor Kathy Hawk described it as an aviation disaster the likes of which LaGuardia had not seen in three decades. FAA administrator Brian Bedford called the two pilots young men at the start of their careers.

[00:17:54]Transportation Secretary Sha Duffy called for $31.5 billion in funding to modernize the air traffic control system. The NTSB deployed 25 investigators to recover the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder.

[00:18:12]Port Authority responders cut a hole in the roof of the aircraft, dropped down inside, and extracted both units by hand. The full investigation will take 12 to 18 months. On Wednesday, the 25th of March, the bodies of Captain Forest and First Officer Gunther were flown home from Newark Liberty International Airport in a dignified transfer aboard an Air Canada aircraft. Antoine Forest's brother, Cedric, wrote a tribute the night after the crash. Have a safe flight, my brother. Oh yes, we've often heard that phrase, but this time will be the last. You were coming and going in the wind, always full of new projects in mind. Gone again in the wind, too soon to say goodbye. I love you, brother. You can leave with your head held high.

[00:19:02]Senica Polytenic flew its campus flags at half mast for McKenzie Gunther. This was the first fatal accident at LaGuardia in 34 years. The last one happened on March 22nd, 1992.

[00:19:17]the same date, 34 years apart, almost to the hour. What I know is this. The system that was supposed to protect Captain Forest and First Officer Gunther failed them at every level. The surface detection system that was supposed to see the truck could not see it. The radio system that was supposed to carry critical information dropped it. The staffing model did not provide enough controllers and the transponders that were supposed to be on those fire trucks were never installed despite the FAA asking for them 10 months earlier.

[00:19:53]Captain Forest and First Officer Gunther flew a textbook approach. Their instruments were clean. Their approach was stable. And in the final seconds, when something appeared on the runway in front of them, the evidence suggests they did everything in their power to save the 72 people behind them. They deserved a clear runway. They did not get one. And the question that will define this investigation is whether anyone will be held accountable for the reasons why.