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Who's to blame for Air Canada crash at LaGuardia Airport? Here's what we know so far
The air traffic controller at LaGuardia Airport who sent a fire truck onto a runway where an Air Canada plane was landing shares responsibility with the truck’s driver for Sunday night’s deadly crash, according to aviation lawyers.
But a former Canadian air traffic controller cautions that determining all of the factors that led to the collision at this point would be “nigh on” to impossible.
“It’s always a cascade of events,” Dennis Wyche, who spent decades as an air traffic controller in Montreal, said Tuesday.
“Anybody who says they know what happened at this point is blowing smoke.”
At this juncture, Wyche said he “would not blame 100 per cent the air traffic controller,” nor would he “blame 100 per cent the truck driver. There’s a combination.”
National Transportation Safety Board Chair (NTSB) Jennifer Homendy also cautioned against jumping to conclusions.
“I would caution against pointing fingers at controllers and saying distraction was involved. This is a heavy workload environment,” she told media on Tuesday.
It’s not unusual for a single air traffic controller to be controlling both planes and trucks on the ground, said Wyche, who retired last year after starting as an air traffic controller in 1990.
“You keep your runway as a sacred space,” he said.
The NTSB revealed in a press conference that the fire truck was not equipped with a transponder that would show the control tower its location. For that reason, a runway warning system failed to sound an alarm before the crash. There is currently no requirement for vehicles on airport grounds to have a transponder, but Homendy suggested they should.
“Air traffic controllers should know what’s before them, whether it’s on airport surface or in the airspace. They should have that information to ensure safety,” she said.
Homendy said NTSB investigators have not yet spoken to the firefighters who were in the truck, so it’s unknown if they heard the frantic warnings to “stop” that came from the control tower seconds before the collision. It’s also not known if the fire truck braked or swerved to avoid the plane
There will be questions in this probe including how much sleep the air traffic controller got before the crash, and whether the fire truck’s driver could see the incoming plane, Wyche said.
“It takes a long time for Transport Canada or the (Federal Aviation Administration in the United States) to do the full, thorough investigation, and right now they’re still picking pieces of it up at LaGuardia off the ground that they’re going to probably assemble in a hangar.”
The Jazz Aviation flight that was operated on behalf of Air Canada collided with the truck around 11:40 p.m. Sunday, killing both pilots. Dozens of people were injured — nine of them seriously — aboard the CRJ-900 jet that was carrying 72 passengers and four crew members.
“It’s kind of a unique situation,” said Jim Brauchle, an aviation attorney and former U.S. Air Force navigator.
“You usually have ground control, which is for taxiing aircraft. However, the exception to that is the active runway. The active runway, because it’s what I would call sacred ground — it’s highly controlled — the tower actually controls the runway. One person gives clearance to both planes taking off and landing on that runway, and any ground traffic that’s going to cross the runway.”
The pilots didn’t have much time to react to the fire truck, Brauchle said.
“That was real close to where they touched down so I don’t think they were going to have much time to get out of it,” he said.
“Probably about the only thing they could do is try to hit the brakes and slow down whatever they could. But when you watch that video, from the time they touch down to impact is a little over a second.”
According to the NTSB, the plane sounded like it touched down eight seconds before the crash.
If one of the pilots tried to veer off the runway to avoid the fire truck, “that would probably have been even worse,” Brauchle said Tuesday in an interview from Chicago.
It appears as if the air traffic controller put the plane and the fire truck “in the same place at the same time,” Brauchle said
Victims could sue the United States government because it runs the FAA, which controls the tower, as well as the New York Port Authority, which operated the truck, he said.
“People, end up having, a lot of times, nightmares,” and issues with post-traumatic stress disorder, Brauchle said. “You get a lot of people that now can’t fly” and can’t do jobs that require frequent travel.
While the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating Sunday’s crash, their findings of probable cause won’t be admissible in court, he said, noting the NTSB is mainly looking to prevent future accidents.
“Over the last four or five years there’s been an increase in what we call runway incursions,” Brauchle said.
While there’s “been near misses over the last several years,” collisions on runways are rare, “because everyone is hyper-vigilant about active runways,” he said.
“It happens, but more in the taxi-way areas and the aprons. You’ll see planes taxiing will hit vehicles because it’s a little bit less controlled.”
A shortage of air traffic controllers has been an issue in the U.S. for more than a decade, Brauchle said. “They’re trying to remedy the problem by pushing more people through training.”
But air traffic controllers usually rotate out regularly during their shifts, “so that there’s somebody fresh in that seat all the time,” said Brauchle, whose firm is representing 24 passengers involved in last year’s crash of Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 at Toronto’s Pearson airport.
Before Sunday’s crash, LaGuardia’s air traffic control tower was dealing with a United Airlines flight that had aborted a take-off “because of what they called a foul smell in the cabin,” said Arthur Rosenberg, an aviation attorney based in New York.
“To me, it seemed like (the air traffic controller involved) was distracted and overwhelmed with the duties and functions he was providing and, as a result, this anomaly happened, which led to a disaster.”
The fire truck dispatched to deal with the United problem had to cross runway four at LaGuardia, said Rosenberg.
“As a former pilot, and just as a matter of common sense, just because you get a clearance to cross an active runway to make best time or whatever it is, you look both ways,” he said.
If the driver or the passenger in the fire truck had looked to their immediate right, “even though visibility was OK — it was a little misty and a little rainy — they likely would have seen the landing lights on the … CRJ-900 that was trying to land and they would have stopped,” Rosenberg said.
“This is a busy, active runway,” he said. “Their duty, as far as I’m concerned, required them to look and clear the area before crossing. And they didn’t do that.”
Passengers could sue both the Port Authority and the FAA, he said. “In addition, they have claims against Air Canada and Jazz (Aviation), which was operating under the Air Canada umbrella.”
Successful claims for physical and psychological injuries could add up for passengers.
“If you’ve got some physical injury along with psychic injury,” Rosenberg said, damages could run into the “many six figures.”
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