Two controllers staffed the LaGuardia Airport tower cab on a chaotic Sunday night when seventy commercial flights crammed into a window that normally handles about half that volume, and one of those controllers cleared a fire truck onto the same runway where an Air Canada Express jet was seconds from touchdown. Both pilots died. Now controllers who work the facility are telling reporters what the numbers already suggest: the tower needed more help that night, and it didn't get it.
The collision between Air Canada Express Flight 8646, a CRJ-900 regional jet arriving from Montreal, and a Port Authority fire truck occurred at 11:37 p.m. at one of the busiest airports in the country. Weather-related delays had stacked traffic well beyond the scheduled count. Only thirty-one flights had been on the books for that late-evening window. Seventy actually moved.
That gap, thirty-one scheduled, seventy actual, sits at the center of a question the National Transportation Safety Board is now investigating: whether the workload inside the tower outstripped the staff assigned to handle it, and whether decades-old safety procedures designed to prevent exactly this kind of disaster were followed.
Six controllers interviewed by Reuters described the workload that night as busy. Five of them said other controllers would typically be brought in or stay past their normal shift end time to manage a heavier-than-scheduled traffic count like the one that built up that Sunday evening.
One current New York-area controller put it plainly:
"The weather wasn't great; there was still a decent amount of traffic coming into LaGuardia."
Late at night, LaGuardia's tower staffing typically drops to two people. One controller sometimes manages both active runways and ground vehicles, a combined workload that experts told Reuters appeared to be in effect the night of the crash. The NTSB confirmed two controllers were working in the glass tower cab at the time of the collision but said investigators were still reviewing whether the local and ground control positions had been combined.
That distinction matters. A 1997 NTSB report on a previous LaGuardia collision, between a private jet and a vehicle, led to new procedures specifying that "local and ground positions shall not be combined prior to" midnight at the New York airport. Whether those procedures remained in effect, and whether they were followed on the night of the crash, are questions the FAA has not yet answered. The agency did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the matter.
The timeline reconstructed from air traffic control audio tells a grim story of how fast the situation deteriorated. Before the collision, a United Airlines flight declared an emergency over a bad odor. An airline industry source reported that the United flight had aborted takeoff twice due to a fault with the plane's anti-ice system. United declined to comment. The emergency prompted a fire truck response, the same truck that ended up on the runway in the Air Canada jet's path.
A detailed timeline published by Breitbart shows the sequence collapsed in seconds. At 11:35:08 p.m., Flight 8646 was cleared to land on Runway 4/22. At 11:37:05 p.m., barely two minutes later, a controller authorized "Truck 1 and company" to cross Runway 4 at Taxiway Delta, the same runway where the jet was about to touch down.
The flight's wheels hit the runway at approximately 11:37:17 p.m. Eight seconds later, at 11:37:25 p.m., the CRJ-900 slammed into the fire truck.
Audio from LiveATC.net captured the controller's frantic attempt to avert disaster:
"Stop. Stop Stop. Stop. Truck 1. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop."
It was too late.
What happened next inside the tower raises its own set of questions. The controller involved in the crash was not immediately relieved from duty, a step the NTSB said was normal practice after such an incident. Instead, the controller continued working and later told another pilot on the frequency what had happened.
As AP News reported, the controller said on airport communications:
"We were dealing with an emergency earlier. I messed up."
A pilot who had witnessed the crash responded: "Nah, man, you did the best you could."
The crash killed the pilot and copilot of Flight 8646 and sent roughly forty passengers, crew members, and two people from the fire truck to hospitals. The jet had been carrying seventy-six people from Montreal.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Monday that LaGuardia was "well-staffed with 33 certified controllers and six in training, at a facility with a target of 37 controllers." On paper, that's close to full strength. But the controllers Reuters spoke with drew a sharper distinction: overall facility staffing is one thing. Who is actually in the tower cab at 11:30 on a Sunday night, when bad weather has doubled the traffic count, is another.
Ray Adams, a retired air traffic controller at nearby Newark Airport in New Jersey, said it was not typical in his experience to combine positions at night when there was a heavy workload. The implication from multiple controllers is clear: the volume that night warranted additional hands, and the standard late-night skeleton crew was not enough.
Cirium data underscores the mismatch. The average number of flights during the same late-Sunday window in March, going back to 2022, was fifty-three. On the night of the crash, seventy flights moved through, a third more than the historical average and more than double the thirty-one that had been scheduled.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said this week it was "too early" to rule anything out. An NTSB spokesperson added that the probe "would review relevant tower procedures." The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey referred questions to the FAA, which manages U.S. air traffic control.
Investigators have recovered both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder from the wreckage. Fox News reported that NTSB Chair Homendy confirmed the cockpit voice recorder was not damaged and had already been sent to Washington, D.C. for analysis. Investigators hope the flight data recorder will help determine the exact positions of the aircraft and the fire truck in the final moments before impact.
The destroyed Air Canada plane and the fire truck were removed from the crash site late Wednesday. The Washington Times reported that the runway reopened Thursday around 10 a.m. after repairs, inspections, and confirmation that it met FAA safety regulations. The Port Authority said reopening the second of LaGuardia's two runways would help "restore full operational capacity," though the airport was still experiencing heavy delays and cancellations.
Aviation disasters, whether involving helicopters in remote mountains or commercial jets at the nation's busiest airports, share a common thread: the investigation almost always reveals whether the people and systems in place matched the demands of the moment.
The NTSB investigation is still in its early stages, and several questions remain unanswered. Were the local and ground control positions combined at the time of the collision? If so, did that violate the procedures put in place after the 1997 LaGuardia incident? Why was the controller not immediately relieved from duty, as the NTSB itself considers normal practice? And why, when weather delays had more than doubled the scheduled traffic, did the tower not bring in additional controllers or hold staff past their shift end?
Secretary Duffy's staffing numbers may look adequate on a spreadsheet. But two people in a tower cab at 11:30 p.m., managing seventy flights and a runway emergency, is not a staffing plan. It's a prayer.
The question is not whether LaGuardia had enough controllers on the payroll. The question is whether enough of them were in the chair when it counted. Two pilots are dead because someone cleared a fire truck onto an active runway with a jet twelve seconds from touchdown. The system that was supposed to prevent that, the procedures, the staffing protocols, the relief policies, either failed or was never properly in place. Taxpayers who fly through LaGuardia, and the families of the two pilots who will never come home, deserve a full accounting. Not a press conference about headcounts.
