Decades of narrowly-avoided disasters and repeated warnings from pilots at New York City airports all but foretold the recent fatal collision on a LaGuardia runway, according to multiple news reports.
On Sunday night, an Air Canada Express regional jet collided with a fire truck on runway 4, killing the two pilots and injuring about 40 people on board. Two firefighters in the truck — which was responding to a separate runway incident involving a United plane — were also injured.
At a press conference Monday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy described the incident as “incredibly sad and troubling.” Duffy said that the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating but declined to elaborate further on “what went wrong.”
In the years leading up to the collision, multiple internal reports have issued clear and urgent concerns about New York’s airports — and about aviation safety more broadly across the country.
LaGuardia Airport is one of the busiest in the country. Located in the borough of Queens, it has a unique design that incorporates two 7,000ft runways, which cross each other in a compact space. It has seen a string of close calls, going back 30 years.
In 1996, an airliner reportedly had to “abruptly” come to a halt on the runway after the crew noticed a vehicle dash in front of the aircraft, according to The Air Current, an aviation-focused news outlet. In December 2000, an Airbus A320 narrowly missed a snow plow by as little as 50ft while taking off late one evening.
Similar near misses were reported in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2021.
At least a dozen reports were also filed in the past two years, highlighting instances in which collisions at LaGuardia were narrowly avoided, according to CNN.
In December 2024, an internal report filed with NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System detailed how a plane nearly struck another aircraft on the ground due to inaccurate directives from air traffic controllers. Five months earlier, a pilot had reported a near‑collision after being cleared to cross the runway while another plane was landing at the same time.
“Please do something,” a pilot wrote in a report last summer, citing a close call.
“The pace of operations is building in LGA (LaGuardia). The controllers are pushing the line… On thunderstorm days, LGA is starting to feel like DCA did before the accident there,” the pilot wrote.
The pilot was referencing the 2025 collision over the Potomac River in the nation’s capital that killed 67 people, making it the deadliest U.S. airline crash in nearly 20 years.
Earlier this month, there were two close calls at airports in the New York area. A Boeing 737 nearly collided with a Boeing 777 at Newark Liberty International Airport last week, and an Air Canada flight came dangerously close to striking another Boeing 777 at John F. Kennedy International Airport on March 12.
In October, a pair of Delta Airlines jets were involved in a “low-speed collision” on the taxiway at LaGuardia, hospitalizing one person.
The incidents in New York City are part of a long‑standing problem at American airports, marked by numerous close calls, overstretched airport staff and an uptick in fatalities.
Authorities have struggled for decades to resolve so-called runway incursions, which are defined by the Federal Aviation Administration as the “incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on the protected area of a surface designated for the landing and take off of aircraft.”
FAA records indicate that such incursions have not substantially improved since 2023, when 1,760 were reported, according to The Air Current. That year, The New York Times reported that the number of near misses had more than doubled compared to the prior decade.
At the same time, the industry has been weighed down by a persistent shortage of air traffic controllers. Over the past decade, the number of air traffic controllers has declined by roughly 6 percent, even as the number of flights has risen by 10 percent.
“These dedicated professionals continue to work short-staffed, often six days a week, ten hours a day for years at a time, using outdated equipment and in rundown facilities that are in many cases more than 60 years old and are long overdue to be modernized and/or replaced,” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told Congress last year.
The strain on air-traffic safety personnel intensified when the Trump administration empowered Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate hundreds of FAA jobs last year, The Atlantic reported.
An FAA spokesperson disputed this and told The Independent: “The government workforce reductions did not affect air traffic controllers and in fact we hired more than 2,000 new controllers last year. Secretary Duffy has repeatedly made that clear.”
Fatal incidents, while extremely rare, have also risen. Data from the Aviation Safety Network Safety Database shows that 548 people lost their lives in aircraft accidents in 2025, the highest total recorded in seven years.
The U.S. Transportation Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent.
Airports are also facing a more acute problem presented by the Department of Homeland Security shutdown which has dragged on for nearly 40 days, leaving Transportation Security Administration officers without pay. Hundreds of officers have since quit, and thousands have called off work.
As a result, wait times at terminals have dramatically increased, and a number of travelers have missed their flights - despite showing up hours earlier than usual at airports. As lawmakers are locked in negotiations over a funding bill, President Donald Trump has deployed federal immigration agents to over a dozen airports to assist.
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