LaGuardia Crash: One Controller For Two Jobs?

According to the NTSB, having two air traffic controllers on duty is “standard practice” during the night shift at LaGuardia, even though this workload is equivalent to that of four people during the day. “We know that this controller remained on duty for several minutes after the incident, when he should normally have been relieved.

That raises questions,” Homendy said.

According to The Atlantic, regardless of whether a two-person team is the norm, the fact that a single controller was responsible, even for just a brief moment, for managing so many simultaneous operations represents a drastic reduction in the airport’s acceptable safety margins. Such an environment, especially when various events unfold rapidly in succession, as was the case on Sunday evening, can lead to what aviators call “task saturation.”

The head of the NTSB urged caution before attributing the tragedy to staff distraction. “It’s a high-pressure work environment,” she emphasized.

The NTSB had previously expressed concerns, during other investigations, regarding fatigue during understaffed night shifts.

“We don’t know if that’s a factor here, but it’s a shift we’ve focused on in past investigations. The U.S. aviation system has multiple layers of defense designed to prevent accidents, so when something goes wrong, it means that many, many things have gone wrong,” she emphasized.

Another line of inquiry the NTSB will be examining is the fact that the surveillance system designed to alert ground controllers to movements on the runway (the ASDE-X system) was not functioning.

Jennifer Homendy also noted that, unlike other vehicles, the fire truck was not equipped with a transponder that could have communicated the truck’s location to the ASDE-X system. At some airports, fire trucks are equipped with such transponders.

The air traffic controllers, as well as the two firefighters in the truck—who were hospitalized after the accident—are to be interviewed.

On Sunday, around 11:45 p.m., an Air Canada plane carrying 72 passengers and 4 crew members landed and collided with a fire truck moments later. The pilot and co-pilot were killed in the accident.

Before the collision, on the air traffic control radio frequency, a controller can be heard authorizing the emergency vehicle to cross part of the tarmac to reach the scene of another incident, then attempting to stop it at the last moment. “Stop, Truck 1. Stop,” he says repeatedly over the radio.

The controller then frantically diverted the other approaching aircraft.

In this accident, pilot Antoine Forest, a 30-year-old man from Coteau-du-Lac, and Mackenzie Gunther of Ontario were killed.

It is worth noting that LaGuardia is the third-busiest airport serving New York, with 32.8 million passengers in 2025, according to figures from the Port Authority.

Located in the borough of Queens, it sits on the shores of Flushing Bay, east of Manhattan, and has two intersecting main runways.

In the past, numerous reports have detailed situations where near-misses at LaGuardia were narrowly avoided, according to CNN’s analysis of the voluntary reporting system. For example, last October, two Delta Airlines regional jets nearly collided on a taxiway at LaGuardia Airport.

Although these reports are reviewed by a team of safety analysts tasked with alerting the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to any hazards, the individual details of each report have not necessarily been verified by government regulatory authorities.

“Please do something,” a pilot wrote last summer in one of many reports regarding LaGuardia Airport submitted to NASA’s aviation safety reporting system. In his report, he specifically mentioned a near-miss incident in which air traffic controllers failed to provide the correct instructions regarding several aircraft in close proximity.

“The pace of operations is picking up at LGA (LaGuardia). Controllers are pushing the limits,” the pilot wrote. “On stormy days, LGA is starting to resemble what [Washington Ronald Reagan Airport] was like before the accident that occurred there.”