Two pilots were killed Sunday night when Air Canada Express Flight 8646 collided with a Port Authority fire truck on a runway at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, authorities said. The crash, which occurred at approximately 11:40 p.m. as the CRJ-900 aircraft had just landed, injured dozens of passengers and crew and shut down one of the nation’s busiest airports for 14 hours, according to NBC News.
The plane, operated by Jazz Aviation as Air Canada Express, was arriving from Montreal carrying 72 passengers and four crew members. The two pilots killed were identified as Antoine Forest, from Coteau-du-Lac, Quebec, and Mackenzie Gunther, according to CBC News., according to CBC News. Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto reportedly confirmed that Gunther graduated with a degree in aviation technology in 2023 and joined Jazz Aviation through a graduate scheme.
Forty-one people from the plane were transported to hospitals for treatment, and 32 of those had been released as of Monday, according to Port Authority Executive Director Kathryn Garcia. Two people inside the fire truck were also hospitalized and were in stable condition. The Port Authority Sergeants Benevolent Association said a sergeant assigned to airport rescue firefighters was driving the truck and a police officer was also on board; both reportedly suffered broken bones but were expected to survive.
Among the most harrowing accounts to emerge was that of flight attendant Solange Tremblay, who was ejected from the aircraft while still strapped into her seat during the collision, according to her family. Her daughter Sarah Lepine told TVA Nouvelles that her mother’s seat was thrown more than 100 meters from the plane, that she had multiple fractures to one leg, and would need surgery, Fox News reported.
Air traffic control audio recordings have raised serious questions about what led to the disaster. The recordings indicate a controller cleared the fire truck to cross Runway 4 before then telling it to stop. A controller was heard saying “I messed up” after the collision. The fire truck had been responding to a separate, unrelated incident involving United Airlines Flight 2384, whose pilots had aborted takeoff after an anti-ice warning light came on and reported an odor in the cabin with flight attendants feeling ill, CBS News reported.
Data from Flightradar24, as reported by CNN, showed the plane was traveling about 130 miles per hour just before it struck the fire truck, based on the last data point collected before the collision.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/23/air-canada-crash-at-laguardia-airport-what-happened-who-were-the-victims”>Al Jazeera, the aircraft struck the truck at about 39 km/h (24 mph), with the last data recorded at 11:37 p.m. Sunday. One unaccompanied minor was among the passengers and was directed to Air Canada’s ticket counter for family reunification, Garcia said.
The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that investigators recovered both the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from the wreckage. Both devices will be transported to Washington, D.C. for analysis. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said her agency asked the FAA to provide a replay of the airport surface detection display that controllers would have seen in the moments before the collision.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul called the incident a disaster the likes of which they had not seen there in three decades. According to CNN, the last fatal crash at LaGuardia happened on March 22, 1992—exactly 34 years to the day before this crash—citing the NTSB’s accident report. LaGuardia was the 19th-busiest airport in the U.S. in 2024, with more than 16.7 million departing passengers, according to FAA data released in 2025.
The ripple effects of the crash spread quickly across the aviation system. LaGuardia reopened at 2 p.m. Monday after a 14-hour closure, but the FAA issued a notice that Runway 4, where the collision occurred, would remain closed until 7 a.m. Friday. FlightAware reported that more than 500 flights had been cancelled or delayed by noon ET on Monday.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy weighed in at a news conference Monday, saying that air traffic control systems cannot fully modernize until Congress funds that effort. The remark pointed to longstanding concerns about aging infrastructure and staffing shortages at the FAA, issues that have drawn renewed scrutiny in the wake of the deadly collision, as NBC News reported.
The investigation remains in its earliest stages, with federal authorities working to piece together the precise sequence of events that put a landing aircraft and an emergency vehicle on the same runway at the same time. For the families of the two pilots and the dozens of injured passengers and crew, the answers cannot come soon enough.
