Investigators in the U.S. and Canada have cautioned that it is too early to determine a cause and that several safeguards would have had to fail for a disaster of this magnitude to occur.
In aviation safety, this is known as the Swiss Cheese Model, which compares the holes in stacked slices of cheese to weaknesses in different layers of safety defences. The holes rarely all line up. But when they do, an error can pass through.
One of the errors now drawing concern from Canadian aviation safety experts is runway incursions, like the one leading up to the collision at LaGuardia.
In 2010, the year the TSB added runway incursions to its watchlist, Nav Canada recorded 334 of them. In its 2025 financial year, Nav Canada recorded 612 runway incursions at Canadian airports between Sept. 1 and Aug. 31, according to data provided to CBC News.
Hell, LaGuardia has ASDE-X installed. The fire truck in question did not have a transponder, rending a significant portion of the system pretty useless in this case.
It’s unclear whether any of the ground vehicles at LaGuardia are equipped with the transponders, or at least it was unclear the last I heard.
I imagine it’s going to become a requirement for ground vehicles to have transponders now, at least at the big airports.
It already is. Lots of finger pointing, but LGA is a overcapacity shithole airport with poor infrastructure regulation.
Jennifer Homendy at FAA has been warning the government for two years and she’s being ignored as hard as Tony Fauci in 2019.
There was an FAA warning that LGA midnight shift ATC was understaffed and over fatigued. They will probably fire her for being competent.