By Gursimran Mehar, Bing Guan and Shubham Kalia<\/p>\n
NEW YORK, March 23 (Reuters) – Both pilots were killed after an Air Canada Express regional jet collided with a fire truck while landing at New York’s LaGuardia airport late on Sunday, closing the airport, authorities and \u200cU.S. media said, in an incident set to draw scrutiny following a string of recent aviation lapses.<\/p>\n
NBC News, which reported the \u200cdeaths, said dozens of people were injured in the incident.<\/p>\n
The Air Canada Express CRJ-900 plane, operated by its regional partner Jazz Aviation, was carrying 72 passengers and four crew members from \u200bMontreal, based on a preliminary passenger list that remained subject to confirmation. Jazz is owned by Chorus Aviation.<\/p>\n
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it was deploying a team of technical experts to investigate the incident.<\/p>\n
FIRE TRUCK WAS CLEARED TO CROSS RUNWAY<\/p>\n
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said the firefighting vehicle was responding to a separate incident when it was struck by the aircraft at the airport’s Runway 4, without elaborating further.<\/p>\n
Minutes before the incident, the \u200cairport’s air traffic control audio broadcast from LiveATC.net indicated \u2060that a United Airlines flight had declared an emergency due to an odor reported onboard. Controllers told the aircraft that fire trucks were available on site.<\/p>\n
A second transmission then shows a fire truck was cleared to cross Runway \u20604, where the collision occurred, at taxiway ‘Delta”.<\/p>\n
Moments later, according to the ATC audio, a controller can be heard saying: “Stop, stop, stop, truck 1 stop, truck 1, stop.”<\/p>\n
NBC News, citing sources, said the fire truck was manned by police officers. It had earlier said a sergeant and an officer had broken limbs and were in stable \u200bcondition \u200bat a hospital.<\/p>\n
AIRCRAFT’S NOSE AND COCKPIT AREA DAMAGED<\/p>\n
The aircraft struck the fire vehicle at \u200ba speed of about 24 miles per hour (39 kph), according \u200cto flight tracking website Flightradar24, which last recorded data at 11:37 p.m. ET (0337 GMT).<\/p>\n
Photos taken by Reuters after the accident showed visible damage to the nose of the plane, which was tilted upward.<\/p>\n
Authorities and emergency agencies did not offer any immediate comments on deaths or injuries.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the airport was expected to remain shut until 2 p.m. ET (1800 GMT) on Monday.<\/p>\n
Flightradar24 said 18 flights had been diverted to other airports, mostly in the New York area, or returned to their point of origin.<\/p>\n
Air Canada referred Reuters to Jazz’s statement and said it was aware of the incident. \u200cThe National Transportation Safety Board and the FAA did not immediately respond to requests \u200bfor comment.<\/p>\n
New York City’s emergency notification system said people could expect cancellations, road closures, \u200btraffic delays and emergency personnel near the airport.<\/p>\n
LaGuardia served over 30 \u200bmillion annual passengers in 2025, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and a wide range \u200cof U.S. airlines operate at the airport.<\/p>\n
RECENT INCIDENTS<\/p>\n
According to the \u200bFAA, there have been 97 runway \u200bincursions in January this year, compared to 133 incidents during the same period last year.<\/p>\n
A bipartisan group of U.S. House lawmakers last month proposed legislation to address 50 aviation safety recommendations issued after a year-long investigation into the January 2025 collision between an American Airlines regional \u200bjet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter \u200cthat killed 67 people.<\/p>\n
Last year, a UPS cargo plane crashed shortly after takeoff in Louisville, Kentucky, killing seven and injuring 11 on \u200bthe ground.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Gursimran Kaur, Shubham Kalia, Abu Sultan, Preetika Parashuraman and Ruchika Khanna in Bengaluru, Bing Guan in New \u200bYork and David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Jamie Freed and Joe Bavier)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Gursimran Mehar, Bing Guan and Shubham Kalia NEW YORK, March 23 (Reuters) – Both pilots were killed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[30278,70106,70141,70079,1087,6661,6970,9,11,10,70142],"class_list":["post-171844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-air-canada","tag-air-canada-express","tag-fire-truck","tag-jazz-aviation","tag-laguardia-airport","tag-national-transportation-safety-board","tag-nbc-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-regional-jet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}