Chilling ATC audio and years of ignored warnings preceded the LaGuardia runway tragedy

3 min readUpdated: Mar 24, 2026 12:29 PM IST

Pilots had flagged safety concerns at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, citing miscommunication, air traffic control missteps and other hazards on multiple occasions in the past two years, CNN has found.

On Sunday, an Air Canada Express plane collided with a fire truck on the runway at New York’s LaGuardia airport on Monday evening, killing the pilot and co-pilot and causing incoming traffic to be diverted, Reuters has reported. The CRJ-900 plane, which was coming in from Montreal, struck the Port Authority vehicle at about 24 miles per hour (39 kph) while landing, the agency reported, according to Flightradar24.

The audio from air traffic control suggests confusion in the moments before the crash. A controller can be heard warning, “Stop, Truck 1. Stop,” before trying to divert aircraft. Another voice later said, “I messed up,” according to recordings cited by The Guardian.

Now, CNN has reviewed government records from the past two years, which revealed reports of multiple occasions when collisions at LaGuardia were narrowly avoided.

A look at a few similar cases at LaGuardia Airport

• According to a CNN report, one of the pilots, last summer, reported a near miss at LaGuardia due to lack of air traffic control guidance to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System. “The pace of operations is building in LGA (LaGuardia). The controllers are pushing the line,” CNN quoted the pilot as saying. “On thunderstorm days, LGA is starting to feel like DCA did before the accident there,” he added, referring to a mid-air collision over the Potomac River in Washington in January 2025, that claimed the lives of over 60 people.
• In December 2024, a report to the NASA database detailed how an aircraft came close to another place on the ground due to a lack of accurate instructions from air traffic controllers.
• In July that year, a copilot reported that a plane had just had a narrow escape from collision after controllers said the plane was cleared to cross the runway even as another aircraft was touching down at the same time.
• In another incident in October last year (2025), one person was injured after two Delta Airlines regional jets crashed on a LaGuardia taxiway.

The CNN’s review of the voluntary reporting system allows staffers in the aerospace industry to flag safety issues anonymously and can take up to several months to include the latest reports, says CNN. While these reports are reviewed by a team of safety analysts tasked with alerting the Federal Aviation Administration of any hazards, every detail of the reports has not necessarily been verified by government regulators.

(With inputs from CNN)

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