Audio from the air traffic tower at LaGuardia Airport indicated that a controller appeared to be distracted when an Air Canada jet struck a Port Authority fire truck, killing the two pilots.
Several minutes after the collision Sunday night, a controller at the airport told the pilot of a Frontier jet that the airport was closed until further notice and that “we were dealing with an emergency earlier,” according to air traffic control audio on the site LiveATC.net, which was verified by The New York Times.
It was unclear what emergency the controller was referring to, but Kathryn Garcia, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns and operates LaGuardia, said air traffic controllers were responding to an aircraft whose pilot, after multiple attempts at takeoff, had requested help before the Air Canada crash.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it had started an investigation. LaGuardia remains closed as of late Monday morning.
It was not clear how many controllers were in the tower at LaGuardia around 11:37 p.m. Sunday night when the crash appears to have occurred. On the audio stream from late Sunday, a controller can be heard yelling “stop, Truck 1, stop,” to a fire truck, just seconds after giving it clearance to cross Runway 4, where the Air Canada plane had just landed.
The Federal Aviation Administration said determining how many controllers were in the tower on Sunday night would be part of the N.T.S.B.’s investigation.
But aviation experts said the tower likely had fewer controllers on duty than they would have had a few hours earlier, when the airport had more flight traffic scheduled. Michael McCormick, a former air traffic controller and a professor of air traffic management at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University, said that air traffic control tower staffing tended to diminish on the overnight shift, when they have fewer flights. He added that two controllers were ordinarily assigned to cover overnight shifts because of the lower traffic volume.
The fire truck was on the runway because it was responding to an earlier incident with a United Airlines plane that had reported an odor in the cabin.
Air traffic controllers are responsible for managing all traffic coming in and out of airports, including vehicles on the ground.
Robin Stein and Christine Chung contributed reporting.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
The post Air Traffic Audio Appears to Show Tower Was Dealing With Incident Before Crash appeared first on New York Times.
