2 pilots killed at LaGuardia Airport when jet collides with Port Authority fire truck

Evan Simko-Bednarski, Roni Jacobson and Rocco Parascandola, New York Daily News on Mar 23, 2026

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NEW YORK — Two pilots were killed when a jet landing at LaGuardia Airport collided with a Port Authority fire truck, authorities said Monday.

The dramatic seconds before and after the crash, which happened about 11:35 p.m. Sunday and left more than 40 survivors hurt, was captured on audio, with an air traffic controller saying he “messed up” by failing to prevent the collision.

The Queens airport was ordered shut down entirely until 2 p.m. Monday as the crash was being investigated by a raft of agencies.

The Air Canada jet, arriving from Montreal, struck the fire truck, which was crossing the runway as it responded to an unrelated incident, about 11:35 p.m. Sunday.

The plane’s nose was sheared off from the impact, leaving the pilot and co-pilot dead. Their names were not immediately released.

NBC News reported that another crew member, a flight attendant, was found — alive — strapped into her jumpseat, which had been thrown from the wreckage of the plane. There was no immediate word on her condition.

“We went down for a regular landing. We came down pretty hard, we immediately hit something. It was chaos from there about five seconds later,” passenger Jack Cabot told ABC7 New York. “Everyone was hunkered down, everyone was screaming. We didn’t have any directions because the pilots’ cabin was destroyed. So someone said, ‘Let’s get the emergency exit, let’s get the door and all jump out.’ And that’s exactly what we did.”

Passenger Rebecca Liquori, who was on her way back from a baby shower in Montreal, told News 12 Long Island that she felt the plane brake hard and heard a loud boom after touchdown. “Everybody just jolted out of their seats. People hit their heads. People were bleeding,” Liquori said.

Liquori said she helped open the emergency exit door. Passengers slid down a wing to get out of the mangled aircraft.

In a statement, Air Canada said the passenger manifest listed 72 passengers and four crew members aboard at the time of the crash.

Forty-one people — passengers, crew members and two Port Authority police officers — were taken to area hospitals, with 32 of them treated for minor injuries and the other nine more seriously hurt, authorities said.

The 32 people with minor injuries have since been released, a Port Authority spokesperson said. The two injured Port Authority officers — who were aboard the fire truck at the time of the crash — were in stable condition.

The tragic sequence of events started when a United Airlines flight aborted takeoff and declared an emergency, reporting a strange odor aboard, audio from LIVEATC.net, a website that captures air traffic control communications, reveals.

“Weird odor, I don’t exactly know how to describe it,” a crew member aboard the United plane told the tower. “Flight attendants in the back are feeling ill because of the odor.”

The crew of the United flight requested a fire truck respond to their location while they waited for a gate to open up to evacuate the aircraft.

Shortly after that conversation, a fire truck operator can be heard asking an air traffic controller for permission to cross runway No. 4 and getting permission to do so.

Less than four seconds later, however, the controller changed up, telling the truck operator and the pilot of a Frontier Airlines plane, to stop.

“Stop, stop, stop, stop,” the controller yelled. “Truck 1, stop, stop, stop. Stop, Truck 1, stop.”

It was too late.

The controller then ordered a Delta Airlines plane to maneuver around the crash site and assured the Air Canada pilots, their fatal injuries unbeknownst to him at the time, to “hold position.”

“Vehicles are responding to you now,” the air traffic controller assures them.

A few moments later, a Frontier pilot lamented what he just saw.

“That wasn’t good to watch,” the pilot said.

“Yeah, I tried to reach out to (inaudible) ... And we were dealing with an emergency and I messed up,” the controller replied.

“Nah, maybe you did the best you could,” the Frontier pilot assured him.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement he had been briefed on the crash.

“The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the incident, and the city is in close contact with federal, state, and local partners,” Mamdani said. “I am grateful to our first responders, whose swift actions saved lives.”

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(Josephine Stratman contributed to this story.)

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