OAN Staff Addie Davis
11:09 AM – Wednesday, March 25, 2026
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reported that the ASDE-X runway safety system failed to trigger an alert before Sunday night’s fatal collision between an Air Canada jet and a fire truck.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy explained during a Tuesday press briefing that the system could not track the fire truck because the vehicle was not equipped with a transponder.
“In order for ASDE-X to work well, you have to know where ground vehicles and aircraft are,” Homendy said. “That vehicle did not have a transponder.”
The system allows air traffic controllers to track the surface movements of aircraft and vehicles, she added.
“ASDE-X did not generate an alert due to the close proximity of vehicles merging and unmerging near the runway, resulting in the inability to create a track of high confidence,” stated an analysis of the safety system, as Homendy quoted.
In a catastrophic ground collision at LaGuardia Airport, two pilots were killed and 41 people hospitalized after an Air Canada Express flight hit a Port Authority fire truck.
According to Homendy, only two people were staffing the tower cab at the time of the accident. While it is standard operating procedure at LaGuardia for overnight controllers to assume multiple roles, Homendy noted that the NTSB’s air traffic control team has voiced concerns about this practice for years.
Currently, investigators are still resolving conflicting information regarding specific duty assignments during the event.
Additionally, Homendy highlighted the NTSB’s long-standing concerns regarding midnight-shift fatigue, though she clarified there is no current evidence that exhaustion played a role in this specific collision. As the investigation continues, she cautioned against “pointing fingers” at controllers while the board is still gathering facts.
“We rarely, if ever, investigate a major accident where it was one failure,” she said, explaining there are multiple layers to prevent an accident.
“When something goes wrong, that means many, many things went wrong,” she added.
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