NTSB investigators said Monday they had recovered both flight recorders from the Air Canada Express CRJ-900 involved in Sunday night’s collision at LaGuardia. According to NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy, the NTSB is beginning a broad review of air traffic control, airport operations and the emergency response that placed an aircraft rescue and firefighting (ARFF) vehicle in the airplane’s path. Homendy said the cockpit voice recorder was not damaged and that investigators expected to begin work on the flight data recorder next.
Homendy also said investigators were collecting surveillance video, FAA surface-detection replays and technical analysis from LaGuardia to determine the positions of both the airplane and the ARFF vehicle, whether the truck was visible to controllers and whether any alerts were generated. She said the debris field stretched from Taxiway Delta across Runway 4 and that evidence collection at the scene could take days.
Additional information from Monday’s Department of Transportation briefing filled in part of the operational picture. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said a United Airlines aircraft had declared an emergency before the accident, prompting the ARFF response that brought the Port Authority vehicle toward Runway 4. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said rumors of only one controller staffing the tower were false, and that LaGuardia has 33 certified controllers against a staffing target of 37, with seven more in training.
Homendy said the NTSB had formed investigative groups covering operations, systems, structures, air traffic control, recorders and airport operations/survival factors, but said the agency was still verifying staffing records, duty assignments and other preliminary information before releasing more detail.
Good briefing - factual, to the point, detailed. Something new for me here was that 25 seconds before the impact, the fire truck requested to cross rwy 4 on frequency. At 20 seconds, it was cleared to cross by the controller. Why didn’t the flight crew notice this conflict? I wonder if the CVR has anything?
Think more about it, the truck and aircraft were probably of different frequencies.