Two Passenger Plane Collisions Occur in Quick Succession at a New York Airport
On the evening of March 22 (local time), two separate incidents involving passenger aircraft striking ground vehicles occurred in quick succession at LaGuardia International Airport in New York. In the first incident, an Air Canada Express flight arriving from Montreal, Canada, collided with a fire truck positioned alongside the runway during its landing. The nose of the aircraft sustained severe damage. According to earlier reports, the accident resulted in serious injuries to four firefighters. Other reports, however, claimed that the incident left two people dead and 70 injured. It is reported that at the time of the incident, there were approximately 100 passengers on board the aircraft and five personnel inside the fire truck. Shortly thereafter, at the same airport, a passenger aircraft operated by Jazz Aviation collided with a fire truck that had been dispatched to respond to the initial incident. The specific details of this second incident remain unclear at this time. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued a temporary ground stop order for all aircraft at the airport. The LaGuardia Airport website indicates that arriving flights are being successively diverted to other airports or are returning to their points of origin.
