Ugh: The Runway Lights That Should’ve Prevented The LaGuardia Tragedy

On Sunday night, we saw an incredibly tragic accident at New York LaGuardia Airport (LGA), whereby an Air Canada Jazz CRJ-900 collided with a fire truck on the runway, killing both pilots, and seriously injuring many others.

While investigations take time, air traffic control audio made it clear that the air traffic controller cleared the fire truck to cross the runway while the Air Canada Jazz CRJ-900 was landing, and he even admitted on frequency, “I messed up.”

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However, there’s typically more than one contributing factor to an accident, and now that video of the collision has been released, it’s becoming clear that another factor was at play.

The fire truck ignored runway warning lights

Following the accident, surveillance footage has been posted of the point at which the Air Canada Jazz CRJ-900 and the fire truck collided. Of course this is hard to watch, so view it at your discretion.

Some people have been asking the question of how the fire truck didn’t see the plane landing on the runway. Even with permission, it’s a best practice to look both ways before crossing a runway. Admittedly we weren’t there, so it’s hard to know what exactly they would have seen, especially since this was at night.

There is one thing that we do know, though — the Runway Entrance Lights (REL) were illuminated shortly before the fire truck crossed the runway. For context, these lights are intended to prevent exactly this kind of a situation.

They’re unrelated to air traffic control instructions, and the idea is that there are solid, bright red lights that are illuminated when a runway shouldn’t be crossed. The red lights are turned off shortly before the plane crosses that part of the runway.

In the above video, you can see them on the part of the runway and taxiway where the fire truck attempts to cross, and they turn off around four seconds into the video, right before the CRJ-900 crosses that point.

If there’s a conflict between these runway lights and instructions from air traffic controllers, any traffic trying to cross the runway should of course follow up with air traffic control about the discrepancy.

Below you can see a video from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) explaining how these runway lights work. As you can tell, this is from many years ago, and the planes shown in that video are a blast from the past.

Unfortunately the “Swiss cheese model” failed

One of the reasons that aviation is incredibly safe is because of the “Swiss cheese model” for avoiding catastrophes. For those not familiar with that:

It likens human systems to multiple slices of Swiss cheese, which have randomly placed and sized holes in each slice, stacked side by side, in which the risk of a threat becoming a reality is mitigated by the different types of defenses which are “layered” behind each other. Therefore, in theory, lapses and weaknesses in one defense (e.g. a hole in one slice of cheese) do not allow a risk to materialize, since other defenses also exist (e.g. other slices of cheese), to prevent a single point of failure.

Obviously the first line of defense here was the air traffic controller giving correct instructions, and then the second line of defense was these runway warning lights, intended to ensure that even if an air traffic controller messes up, it wouldn’t have catastrophic impacts. We see so many close calls saved by these redundancies, but unfortunately this wasn’t one of those cases.

I imagine the air traffic controller feels horribly, as our air traffic control system has been under so much stress for such a long time, with controllers working way more than they should. It’s not easy to have a job where you need to be right 100% of the time, and where even a single error can have fatal consequences. Meanwhile I’m also sure the fire truck operators were trying their best to operate safely here.

But goodness, I of course feel worst for the two Air Canada Jazz pilots who lost their lives. There was absolutely nothing they could do to save this situation. May they rest in peace, and my hope is that they barely even knew what was happening, and that it all went very quickly, and they didn’t suffer too much.

My thoughts are with their family and friends. I hope they can find some comfort in knowing that both pilots were huge aviation geeks, and were doing what they loved down to the last minute. But goodness, I’m sure that doesn’t actually help with the suffering they must be going through, as both pilots were still early in their careers, and were young.

Bottom line

On Sunday night, we saw an Air Canada Jazz CRJ-900 and fire truck collide on a LaGuardia runway. While we know that an air traffic controller incorrectly gave the fire truck permission to cross the runway while another plane was landing, that wasn’t the only factor here.

This runway was equipped with Runway Entrance Lights (REL), intended to prevent exactly this kind of situation, to add an extra layer of protection in case an air traffic controller gives incorrect instructions. Unfortunately that didn’t seem to help, though.