The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a preliminary report on the possible causes of the tragic March 22, 2026, crash at LaGuardia Airport of a commercial jet with a fire truck that killed two pilots and left dozens of others injured, with an initial conclusion that a number of factors contributed to the fatal collision.
The preliminary report, issued April 23, 2026, focused on the lack of transponders on the fire trucks, which investigators suggested could have enabled an automatic warning system to alert air traffic controllers to an imminent collision, contributing to the landing jet’s collision with the fire truck responding to a separate emergency. The Port Authority operates the three major airports in the New York area, including LaGuardia.
Without the transponders, the “system could not uniquely identify each of the seven responding vehicles or reliably determine their positions, or tracks,” investigators wrote in the report. “As a result, the system was unable to correlate the track of the airplane with the track of Truck 1” — the truck struck by the plane that was first in line of the responding vehicles. The report found that the convoy of fire trucks made multiple attempts to contact the air traffic control tower to seek permission to cross the runway, beginning more than 90 seconds before the collision.
According to the preliminary NTSB report, the lead truck attempted to contact the tower 40 seconds after the plane was given clearance to ask to cross the runway, but a simultaneous transmission obscured the call. Then, about 20 seconds before the collision, Truck 1 got permission from air traffic control to cross Runway 4, along with the rest of the emergency convoy vehicles following the lead fire truck, the report states. At that moment, the Air Canada jet was in the final seconds of its descent toward the runway and was only 130 feet above the ground, according to the NTSB report.
The crash killed both pilots of Air Canada Flight 8646 and sent 39 passengers to area hospitals, as well as two firefighters in the truck. In 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration recommended that airports outfit their emergency vehicles with such technology to avoid close calls.
Additionally, the report found that two people were staffed in the control tower, standard for the overnight shift there, with one operating as the local controller while the other was operating as both the ground controller and controller-in-charge. But according to the report, in the minutes leading up to the collision, only one controller was managing both the airplanes and the ground vehicles. The second controller had been helping a United Airlines plane.
The 15-page report is still preliminary, and the board has yet to reach a conclusion about the cause of the accident. Similar investigations generally take about a year.
To read the NTSB preliminary report with photos, click here.