Shocking close-up images show the horribly mangled front of the Air Canada flight that collided with a fire truck in Sunday’s deadly LaGuardia Airport crash — revealing that the plane’s whole nose and cockpit were ripped straight off.
The images exclusively obtained by The Post showed the twisted wreckage of Air Canada Express Flight 8646, which was carrying 72 passengers and four crew members from Montreal when it collided with a Port Authority fire truck at the Queens airport around 11:40 p.m.
The pics — taken when the destroyed CRJ-900 was moved to a hangar to collect passengers’ personal belongings on Wednesday — showed that the cockpit, where the two pilots had been driving the plane when it crashed into a truck on Runway 4, was completely blasted off.
Both pilots — Antoine Forest and Mackenzie Gunther — died upon impact.
Roughly 40 people, including a flight attendant who miraculously survived being flung 300 feet, were injured, but all will be OK thanks to the heroic pilots. Two Port Authority officers who were inside the fire truck also miraculously survived without life-threatening injuries.
The new photos provide the clearest and closest picture yet of the sheer level of destruction the plane sustained in the fatal crash.
The aisle of the plane and shredded wires spill out of the decapitated aircraft, while the cockpit is completely obliterated, and the front rows are dinged up in the images. The damage continues to the underbelly of the jet, where the front landing gear and wheels are nonexistent.
The plane wreck remained on view on the runway Tuesday for other horrified passengers to see as investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) sifted through the debris.
Heartstopping audio posted online revealed that a tower crew realized too late that the truck and plane were about to collide after both were given the all clear for the same runway.
“Stop, stop, stop, stop!” a controller pleaded with the truck over the radio. “Truck 1, stop, stop, stop! Stop, Truck 1! Stop!”
A controller can be heard later in the audio admitting, “I messed up.”
NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters at a Tuesday press conference that two personnel in the control towerwere performing multiple roles at the time, which is standard procedure at LaGuardia for the midnight shift they were working.
But one of them cleared the emergency vehicle to cross the runway to respond to an incident on another plane just as the Air Canada jet was landing, Homendy revealed.
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“We know that that controller was still on duty for several minutes afterwards. Normally, they would be relieved,” she said.
Homendy said Tuesday on Fox and Friends it was “too early” to solely blame the air traffic controller overheard in the audio and that the agency was investigating “multiple failures.”
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