The cockpit of Air Canada Express flight 8646 was sheared off. The fire truck lay on its side, surrounded by debris and twisted metal. And in the seconds before impact, an air traffic controller’s voice cut through the radio: “Stop, Truck 1, stop, stop, stop!”
It was too late.
The CRJ 900, which had just landed from Montreal with 72 passengers and four crew members, collided with a firefighting vehicle on the runway at LaGuardia Airport around 11:40 p.m. Sunday. Both pilots died. Forty-one people were taken to hospitals, with 31 later discharged. Some remain in serious condition.
What Happened
The fire truck had been called minutes earlier to a separate incident: another plane had “reported an issue with odour,” said Port Authority Executive Director Kathryn Garcia. While the truck was on the runway, the Air Canada jet touched down.
In audio from the control tower, a staff member can be heard shouting warnings. But the collision was unavoidable.
“We were literally like 100 meters away,” 23-year-old eyewitness Leo Medina told the BBC. “It was like the plane got cut in half.”
The crash immediately shut down one of America’s busiest airports. More than 32 million passengers pass through LaGuardia annually. On Monday morning, hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed. The airport is not expected to reopen until at least 2 p.m. ET, authorities said.
The Victims
The two pilots who died have not yet been identified. The sergeant and police officer inside the firefighting vehicle were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries and are in stable condition.
“I visited them both in the hospital, as has the chairman, and they were able to speak,” Garcia said.
All 72 passengers and the remaining crew have been accounted for.
The Investigation
The National Transportation Safety Board has launched a full investigation. Investigators will examine:
· The speed of the aircraft at landing
· Staffing in the air traffic control tower at the time of the crash
· Whether anyone was ejected from the aircraft
· The sequence of events that led the fire truck to be on the runway when the plane was landing
“Emergency response protocols were immediately activated,” Garcia said. But the central question remains: how did a fire truck end up in the path of a landing jet?
The Aftermath
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he had “been briefed on the tragic collision” and praised first responders whose “swift actions saved lives.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul called the incident “heartbreaking.”
“Our thoughts are with the victims, their families, and everyone affected,” she said.
For now, LaGuardia remains closed. The runways are silent. The twisted wreckage of a CRJ 900 and a fire truck sit where, hours earlier, planes landed and departed every few minutes.
And investigators are left to answer a question that, for the families of two pilots, for 41 injured passengers, and for the first responders who rushed toward a scene they could not stop, will never be fully answered: what went wrong?
