"Do Something": Pilots Flagged Miscommunications At LaGuardia Before Crash

An air traffic controller pleaded with the driver of the fire truck to stop seconds before its deadly crash with an Air Canada plane on the runway of New York's LaGuardia Airport, a review of air traffic control communications showed. The truck was cleared to cross the runway by the air traffic controller, who admitted after the crash that he had been "dealing with an emergency earlier" and that he "messed up".

Both the pilot and the co-pilot of the passenger jet were killed in the crash, which also left dozens injured. The incident brought focus to years of complaints about air traffic control missteps and miscommunications at LaGuardia Airport.

CNN reviewed government records for the past two years and found that pilots had been flagging several hazards at LaGuardia Airport, but the administration had failed to act on them.

"Please do something," a pilot wrote last summer in one report about the airport to NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System after a close call when air traffic controllers failed to provide appropriate guidance about multiple nearby aircraft.

"The pace of operations is building in LGA (LaGuardia). The controllers are pushing the line," the pilot said. "On thunderstorm days, LGA is starting to feel like DCA did before the accident there," they added, referring to the January 2025 mid-air collision over the Potomac River in Washington, DC, that killed more than 60 people.

LaGuardia's runway had been a disaster in waiting for years. Last October, two regional jets of Delta Airlines collided on the taxiway, sending one person to the hospital. CNN reported there had been multiple other reports detailing situations where collisions were narrowly avoided at the airport.

The report also cited a near-miss incident from December 2024, when a plane came dangerously close to another aircraft on the ground because of inaccurate instructions from air traffic controllers. A few months before, in July 2024, a copilot reported a similar near-collision after controllers cleared the plane to cross the runway even though another aircraft was landing at the same time.

"Ground control issued a stop command just in time," according to a report to the NASA database.

The American Aviation Crisis

Irrespective of the party in power, the US government has been trying to run air traffic control on the cheap for decades. This has resulted in staffing shortages and badly outdated equipment. According to a report by The Atlantic, several air traffic control towers are operating below recommended capacity.

After the outages last spring, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy raised concerns over the infrastructure used to keep flyers safe.

"We use floppy disks. We use copper wires... The system that we're using is not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today," Duffy said.

But despite repeated warnings from airlines and regulators, successive congressional sessions and presidential administrations have failed to fix the problem.