What LaGuardia's Air-Traffic Staffing Rules Reveal About the Fatal Air Canada Crash
On the night of March 22, 2026, Air Canada Express Flight 8646, a CRJ-900 regional jet from Montreal carrying 76 people, struck a fire truck seconds after landing at New York's LaGuardia Airport. The crash killed both pilots, 30-year-old Antoine Forest and 24-year-old Mackenzie Gunther, and sent 39 people to hospitals, including the two occupants of the fire truck. It happened at roughly 11:37 p.m., during a period of unusually heavy traffic.
The National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report identified several contributing factors. The fire truck drove through a stop-light equivalent. The truck lacked a transponder that would have activated a crash-warning system. An emergency involving another plane was still ongoing. And the airport was handling far more flights than normal.
The investigation has also turned to staffing inside LaGuardia Tower. The NTSB said it was seeking information about the duties each air traffic controller was performing at the time of the crash. Two controllers were on duty, which matched normal scheduling.
The staffing question centers on a rule about combining positions. According to NBC News, a 2023 LaGuardia Tower Standard Operating Procedures document, described as still current, states: "Positions at LaGuardia Tower are not to be consolidated to one position prior to midnight local time or 90 minutes after the start of the shift, whichever is later." The crash took place before midnight, meaning the local and ground controller positions should not have been merged into one unless the shift began before 10:07 p.m.
Traffic that night pushed the airport well beyond its typical load. Reuters reported that 70 commercial flights took off or landed in the 90 minutes before the collision. That compared with an average of 53 such flights during the same period on Sunday evenings in March since 2022, and it was far above the 31 flights originally scheduled. Several current and former U.S. air traffic controllers told Reuters that LaGuardia was so busy that additional staff should have been brought in.
The rule limiting position consolidation has a specific history. The NTSB's final report on a 1997 collision at LaGuardia between a private jet and a vehicle led to a rule barring the combination of local and ground positions before midnight at the airport. The local and ground positions are separate roles in the tower: one manages runway operations while the other handles taxi movements and vehicles on the airport surface. Merging them puts more responsibility on a single controller during a period when the rule assumes traffic is light enough to allow it.
A preliminary report does not assign fault. It is not yet known whether the staffing arrangement or the workload inside the tower contributed to the collision. But the investigation will likely examine why the positions were combined, why traffic was so heavy, and whether the controllers had enough support. The larger question is whether a rule written after a previous LaGuardia accident was followed, and what should happen when it is not.