Air Canada Express Flight 8646, a CRJ-900 regional jet operated by Jazz Aviation carrying seventy-two passengers and four crew members from Montreal, collided with a Port Authority Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting vehicle on Runway 4 at LaGuardia Airport at approximately 11:40 p.m. Sunday, killing both pilots and injuring forty-one others in the first fatal crash at the airport in more than three decades, according to officials cited by NBC News, CBS News, and the Associated Press. The National Transportation Safety Board has launched a full investigation into the disaster — but the agency’s own chairwoman disclosed Monday that the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown delayed investigators from reaching the scene, with one specialist stranded in a Houston TSA line for three hours before the NTSB intervened.
The collision occurred as the fire truck was crossing the runway to respond to a separate incident — a United Airlines flight that had aborted takeoff after an anti-ice warning light activated and crew members reported an odor in the cabin, according to Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford, as reported by NPR. Air traffic control recordings obtained by CBS News and other outlets indicate that a controller cleared the fire truck to cross Runway 4 at taxiway Delta, then seconds later began urgently ordering it to stop. The arriving Air Canada jet, which preliminary FlightRadar24 data provided to ABC News indicates was traveling between 93 and 105 miles per hour at the time of impact, struck the vehicle before it could clear the runway.
The two pilots killed were identified by Radio-Canada sources, confirmed by CBC News, as Antoine Forest, a thirty-year-old from Coteau-du-Lac, Quebec, and MacKenzie Gunther. The Federal Aviation Administration described them as “two young men at the start of their careers,” according to ABC News. Forest had served as a first officer with Jazz Aviation since late 2022 after flying for regional carriers Air Saguenay and ExactAir, according to Newsweek. Gunther graduated from Seneca Polytechnic’s aviation technology program in 2023 and joined Jazz Aviation through the airline’s pathways program immediately thereafter, his alma mater confirmed in a statement reported by multiple Canadian outlets.
The impact demolished the cockpit and forward fuselage of the aircraft, pitching its nose upward and leaving it resting on its tail on the runway. A flight attendant, identified in Canadian media as Solange Tremblay, was found by Port Authority Police still strapped to her jumpseat more than a hundred meters from the aircraft after being ejected through the severed cockpit area, according to the Anchorage Daily News citing the Associated Press. Her daughter told Canadian broadcaster TVA Nouvelles that Tremblay suffered multiple fractures to one leg and will require surgery, calling her survival “a total miracle.” The two Port Authority officers aboard the fire truck were identified by officials as Sgt. Michael Orsillo and Officer Adrian Baez, according to NBC News. Their injuries were described as non-life-threatening; Baez was released Monday and Orsillo was held overnight for observation, according to ABC7 New York.
Of the forty-one people hospitalized, thirty-two had been released by Monday morning, Port Authority Executive Director Kathryn Garcia said at a news conference, according to CBS News. Nine remained in care, some with serious injuries. Law enforcement sources told CBS News that most injuries consisted of broken bones and bruises, though one person suffered a brain bleed.
The NTSB dispatched a go-team of twenty-five specialists to investigate, but NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy disclosed at a Monday evening news conference that the team faced extraordinary logistical obstacles reaching the crash site. The partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown, now in its sixth week after DHS funding lapsed on February 14, has crippled TSA staffing at airports nationwide. Homendy told reporters that the agency’s air traffic control specialist — a critical member of the investigative team — was stuck in a Houston TSA security line for three hours before the NTSB called airport officials to intervene, as reported by The Hill and NBC News. “We called — in Houston — to beg, to see if we can get her through, so we can get her here,” Homendy said, according to The Hill. She added that it had been “a really, really big challenge to get the entire team here.”
Homendy herself drove from Washington, D.C., to New York rather than attempt to fly, as did other senior NTSB staff, while additional investigators arrived by train, according to the Daily Beast and Newser citing the New York Times. Some team members were not expected to reach LaGuardia until early Tuesday, and the agency’s first full day of investigation was scheduled for that morning, according to ABC7 New York. The full investigative team was not expected on site until approximately 1:00 a.m. Tuesday, according to Audacy’s NewsRadio 1080 KRLD.
The TSA staffing crisis behind the delays is acute and measurable. More than four hundred TSA officers have quit since the shutdown began, according to DHS, as reported by NBC News and The Hill. Acting DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Lauren Bis told The Hill that the highest single-day callout rate during the shutdown reached 11.76 percent on Sunday, March 21, with more than 3,450 officers failing to report. Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport — where the NTSB investigator was delayed — saw wait times exceeding four hours on Monday, with a 42.4 percent callout rate among TSA officers at that facility, according to Audacy.
The substance of the NTSB investigation is now focused on the sequence of air traffic control decisions that placed the fire truck on an active runway. Investigators want to interview the controller who was managing both ground and tower frequencies during the incident, according to Reuters. Audio recordings posted by liveatc.net and reported by CBS News capture the controller telling a Frontier Airlines pilot, roughly twenty minutes after the collision, that he had been managing a prior emergency. Air traffic control audio reported by Al Jazeera and CBS News captured the controller stating: “I messed up.” A Frontier pilot who witnessed the crash responded, as captured in the same recording and reported by Reuters and CBS News. At least one controller was removed from duty as investigators sought to conduct interviews, NBC News reported, citing NTSB Chairwoman Homendy.
Both of the aircraft’s black boxes — the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder — were recovered Monday after Port Authority emergency responders cut a hole in the roof of the aircraft to access them, according to NTSB Chairwoman Homendy as reported by NBC News and CBS News. The recorders were driven to the NTSB’s laboratories in Washington, D.C., and Homendy confirmed that the cockpit voice recorder was undamaged. The flight data recorder was to be examined Tuesday.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy traveled to LaGuardia Monday and addressed the question of controller staffing levels. LaGuardia has thirty-three certified air traffic controllers against a target of thirty-seven, with seven additional controllers in training, Duffy said, according to NPR and ABC News. He described the airport as “very well-staffed” and said that reports of a single controller working in the tower Sunday night were inaccurate, according to NBC News. However, Duffy declined to reveal the precise staffing configuration at the time of the crash, stating that information would first be shared with the NTSB. He reiterated his call for Congress to provide an additional nineteen billion dollars to complete an air traffic control modernization program that has received twelve and a half billion to date, as reported by Reuters.
The collision has sent reverberations through the American aviation system at a moment of compounding strain. LaGuardia, the nineteenth busiest airport in the United States in 2024 according to FAA data cited by NPR, was closed for fourteen hours following the crash, reopening with a single operational runway at 2:00 p.m. Monday. Runway 4, where the wreckage remains, will stay closed until at least 7:00 a.m. Friday, according to an FAA notice reported by ABC News and CBS News. Separately, Newark Liberty International Airport across the Hudson River issued a ground stop Monday morning after its air traffic control tower was evacuated due to smoke, according to NPR, further straining the region’s airspace capacity.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul called the collision “a disaster the likes of which we’ve not seen here in three decades,” according to NBC News. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged a thorough investigation, according to ABC News. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the crash “deeply saddening” and confirmed Canadian officials are cooperating with U.S. investigators, according to NPR. President Trump, speaking before boarding Air Force One, called the situation “terrible” and said a mistake had been made, as reported by CBS News and NPR.
The investigation is expected to take between twelve and eighteen months to complete, according to former NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt, who spoke to CBS Mornings. Investigators will examine controller-to-controller coordination, whether the airport’s surface detection equipment generated alerts before the collision, and the full communication record among all parties involved. Canada’s Transportation Safety Board is sending a team of technical advisers to participate in the probe as part of the NTSB’s investigative group, Homendy confirmed, according to NBC News.
What has emerged in the first forty-eight hours is a portrait of an aviation safety apparatus under duress from multiple directions simultaneously — an aging air traffic control infrastructure that the Transportation Secretary himself acknowledges requires billions more in investment, a TSA workforce hollowed out by weeks of unpaid labor, and a federal investigative agency whose experts cannot reach a disaster scene because the security architecture of American airports has been degraded by a political impasse in the United States Congress. The NTSB will determine the proximate cause of the collision on Runway 4. The systemic conditions that surrounded it are already visible to the nation.