Aviation experts have suggested that 'one clear error' was made in the Air Canada crash at LaGuardia airport on Sunday night.
The flight from Montreal to New York initially touched down safely before colliding with a fire truck that was on the runway, sadly killing both pilots on board the plane while a flight attendant was ejected from her seat.
Amid the recent surge in aviation accidents, there were eyes on traffic control when this accident first occurred, with the released audio showing how one traffic controller admitted to a mistake.
"Stop Truck 1, stop, stop, stop!" the controller was heard to shout, before the air traffic controller had to switch attention to another plane that had been coming in to land and ordered it to 'go around runway'.
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"Jazz 646, I see you collided with vehicle here, just hold position. I know you can't move. The vehicles are responding to you now."
Another pilot asked him if the runway was closed and he repeated the order to go around the runway, while another pilot whose plane had been on the ground said 'that wasn't good to watch'.
The controller said: "Yeah, I know, I was here. I tried to reach out to them. I stopped and we were dealing with an emergency earlier and I messed up."
The grounded pilot reassured him: "No man, you did the best you could."
An aviation expert's take on the accident
Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, has now detailed exactly why the controller might have made that mistake, while speaking to the New York Post.
“There are two parts here — there’s the control in the tower, also called local control, and there’s ground control. And those two air traffic control entities are supposed to coordinate with each other,” Schiavo explained.
“So clearly they either did not coordinate, or they did and were just wrong. But giving a firetruck clearance to cross the runway after an aircraft has been cleared to run in this final is a clear error. There’s just no way around that,” she said.
'Someone made a very critical mistake'
“Who gave the final clearance for that fire truck across the runway? It should have been the tower, but clearly … someone made a very critical mistake in allowing a fire truck clearance to cross the runway when an aircraft had been given a landing clearance. That’s my take on it.”
Harvey Sconick, a retired air traffic controller who spent more than 38 years with the FAA, was slightly more outspoken in his criticism of the controller, describing them as 'brain-dead'.
“The controller who crossed those vehicles while the airplane was landing just went brain-dead for a minute,” he said. “There’s no explanation I can give you that would make any sense why the controller would cross those vehicles, knowing that there’s a runway, that there’s an airplane flaring out to land.
"It’s possible that one person was directing both air and ground traffic late at night when the airport got less busy, or perhaps the controllers were working on different frequencies and unable to communicate,” he said.
“Unless the fire truck driver fell asleep, he would have heard that there was an airplane landing on that runway,” the expert said. “And when the controller cleared him to cross the runway. He would have said, ‘Hey, are you sure you want us to cross? You’ve got a guy landing.’"
More than 40 people were taken to the hospital in the wake of the accident, but just nine are still receiving treatment at the time of publication.
It has also been confirmed that the fire truck had been attending to another plane, which had failed its takeoff, when the accident occurred.
Topics: New York
James Moorhouse