Federal investigators say an Air Canada Express jet struck a fire truck seconds after it was cleared to cross Runway 4, killing both pilots and injuring dozens of other people aboard.
NEW YORK, N.Y. — A flight attendant survived being thrown from an Air Canada Express plane during a fatal runway collision at LaGuardia Airport late Sunday, as investigators worked this week to explain how a fire truck crossed in front of the arriving jet.
The survival of crew member Solange Tremblay became the most startling part of a crash that also killed Capt. Antoine Forest and First Officer Mackenzie Gunther and sent dozens of passengers and crew to hospitals. The case now sits at a critical early stage. Federal investigators have outlined the final seconds before impact, Air Canada says four injured people remain hospitalized, and the National Transportation Safety Board is tracing failures in radio communication, runway warnings and vehicle tracking systems that were supposed to keep a landing aircraft and an emergency truck from occupying the same strip of pavement at the same time.
Flight 8646, a Jazz Aviation CRJ-900 operating for Air Canada Express, arrived from Montreal just before midnight Sunday with 72 passengers and four crew members on board. Federal officials said the aircraft struck an Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting vehicle after landing on Runway 4 at LaGuardia. The plane’s nose and cockpit were torn apart in the collision, and the damage shut down airport operations for hours while firefighters, police officers and investigators flooded the runway. Air Canada later said 39 passengers and crew members were hurt in the crash, while the two firefighters in the truck also survived. The injured were taken to area hospitals during the night and into Monday morning. By Wednesday, the airline said all but four of the injured passengers and crew members had been released, a sign that the medical emergency had eased even as the crash investigation widened.
Tremblay’s survival gave the disaster an almost impossible detail. Her daughter, Sarah Lepine, told Canadian media that her mother was still strapped into her seat when she was thrown from the aircraft and landed on the tarmac. Lepine called it a “total miracle.” Reports this week said Tremblay suffered multiple fractures to one leg and required surgery but was otherwise in stable condition. Aviation safety experts said that outcome likely depended on the design of the cabin crew jump seat and restraint system, which is built to hold a flight attendant in place during violent forces that ordinary passenger seats are not meant to handle in the same way. Even with that equipment, investigators and safety experts have treated her survival as extraordinary. The seat did not save the pilots, whose cockpit area absorbed the worst of the impact. Their deaths turned what could have been remembered as a near miss into LaGuardia’s first fatal accident in more than three decades.
By Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board had laid out a tighter timeline of the last seconds before the crash. Chair Jennifer Homendy said one of only two air traffic controllers on duty at the airport that night cleared the fire truck to cross Runway 4 just 12 seconds before the Air Canada flight touched down. Investigators said the truck asked to cross the runway about 25 seconds before impact, even though the plane had already been cleared to land nearly two minutes earlier. The controller then issued urgent stop calls, but there was too little time left. Homendy said investigators are still working to determine whether the truck crew heard the warnings and whether radio overlap, workload or other communication problems blocked or delayed the message. The agency recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from the wreckage and is also interviewing controllers, firefighters and other airport personnel to understand how the conflict developed so close to touchdown.
The case has also focused attention on the safety systems that should have backed up the people in the tower and on the ground. Homendy said LaGuardia’s ASDE-X surface surveillance system did not trigger the warning investigators would have expected before the collision. One major reason, she said, was that the fire truck did not have a transponder, which limited the system’s ability to track its movement and predict danger. The NTSB also said runway status lights embedded in the pavement appeared to be working. Those lights are meant to flash red when a vehicle should not enter a runway. Investigators have not said whether the truck crew saw the warning or whether the urgency of a different emergency call drew attention away from it. The fire truck had been responding to another aircraft issue, an odor event involving a United flight, when it was directed across the runway. That detail matters because it shows the fatal collision grew out of a chain of overlapping problems, not a single isolated movement.
The deaths of Forest and Gunther added a personal dimension to a story that at first sounded like pure systems failure. Canadian officials and colleagues described both men as young pilots at the start of promising careers. Forest was mourned in his hometown in Quebec, while Gunther’s former aviation program in Ontario lowered flags to half-staff. FAA Administrator Brian Bedford called their deaths an “absolute tragedy.” Passenger accounts have also reinforced the sense that the cockpit crew may have reduced the toll in the final instant. One passenger, Clément Lelièvre, said the pilots’ “incredible reflexes” and hard braking appeared to save lives. Investigators have not reached any formal conclusion on that point, and the final accident report may take months. But those early accounts have become part of the public memory of the crash, especially because so many passengers survived a violent impact that shredded the front of the airplane and sent debris across the runway.
The airport impact was immediate and unusually visible. LaGuardia closed for hours after the collision, and hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled as crews worked around wreckage left on or near one of the airport’s two runways. Even after service resumed, the damaged runway remained partly blocked while airport and airline crews cut away debris and prepared the mangled aircraft to be moved to a hangar. By Wednesday, workers were towing the wreckage from the runway, a sign that the emergency phase was giving way to the slower work of reconstruction and analysis. But the scene still showed the violence of the crash. Photos from the airfield showed the front section ripped apart, the landing gear exposed and the fire truck itself badly damaged. For one of the nation’s busiest airports, the operational disruption underscored how a collision lasting only seconds can ripple into the larger air system for days.
What happens next will unfold largely through technical findings rather than dramatic courtroom filings. The NTSB is leading the investigation, with the FAA participating and Canadian transportation authorities assisting because the plane was operated by a Canadian carrier. Investigators are expected to keep analyzing the black box data, radio traffic, runway lighting records, vehicle equipment and controller staffing decisions from the overnight shift. They also must determine whether the fire truck had the equipment and procedures that federal safety guidance envisioned for airfield vehicles moving near active runways. No criminal allegation has been announced, and aviation crash investigations do not begin with charges. Instead, the early process centers on cause, sequence and preventability. Only after that record becomes clearer will regulators, airport officials and the airline face harder questions about whether this was mainly a human error case, a systems design failure or a layered breakdown that exposed weaknesses in how a major airport handles simultaneous emergencies.
For passengers and crew, though, the story is still less technical than physical. It began as a routine arrival from Montreal and turned into chaos after the wheels touched down. Survivors described a sudden violent jolt, a cabin thrown forward and an evacuation carried out under shock and confusion. The image that has stayed with many people is not just the torn cockpit or the crippled truck, but the fact that a flight attendant was found alive after being hurled from the aircraft, still attached to her seat. That detail has shaped the public reaction because it compresses the scale of the crash into one impossible picture, a person surviving where survival seemed unlikely. It also keeps the focus on the narrow margin between catastrophe and something even worse. Investigators now know the plane and truck met on the same runway. The harder question is why every layer meant to prevent that conflict failed at once.
As of Thursday, four injured passengers and crew members remained hospitalized, and the NTSB had not announced a cause. The next major milestone will be a fuller public account from investigators on the radio calls, runway warnings, vehicle equipment and staffing decisions that led to the collision on March 22.
Author note: Last updated March 26, 2026.