Anonymous safety reports submitted to NASA reveal pilots warned of near-miss collisions at the New York airport months, sometimes years, before fatal collision on March 23

Emergency crews respond to an Air Canada Express plane on the tarmac after the plane collided with a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in the Queens borough of New York

The scene at LaGuardia Airport in New York City after an Air Canada Express plane collided with a firetruck on March 22.Credit : Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty

Pilots raised safety concerns regarding potentially hazardous conditions at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) months and in some cases, years, before the deadly collision that killed two people this week.

“The pace of operations is building in LGA. The [air traffic] controllers are pushing the line,” one pilot wrote last summer in a report submitted about LaGuardia Airport in New York City to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System. During one incident, the pilot alleged, an air traffic controller failed to provide appropriate guidance to multiple nearby aircraft.

“Please do something,” the pilot said. “On Thunderstorm days, LGA is starting to feel like DCA did before the accident there,” they said, referencing the fatal midair collision near Washington, D.C. ‘s Ronald Reagan National Airport that killed 67 people in January 2025.

A large portion of the damaged plane fuselage is lifted from the Potomac River during recovery efforts after the American Airlines crash on February 03, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia

The scene after an American Airlines plane crashed near Washington D.C. on Jan. 29, 2025.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty

That warning, first reported by CNN, came more than six months before Sunday’s deadly crash that killed two pilots, including Antoine Forest, and sent 41 people to the hospital.

Around 11:40 p.m. local time on March 22, a Jazz Aviation flight operating on behalf of Air Canada collided with a Port Authority Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting vehicle while landing, LaGuardia officials reported on X. The vehicle, a firetruck, was crossing the runway to respond to a separate incident.

An air traffic control tower at LaGuardia Airport in the Queens borough of New York, New York, USA
An air traffic control tower at LaGuardia Airport in New York City.SARAH YENESEL/EPA/Shutterstock

In an audio recording of the air traffic controllers working at LaGuardia, one employee is heard giving the go-ahead for the truck to cross before shouting, “Stop, stop, stop, stop, truck 1, stop, stop, stop.”

He later says, “We were dealing with an emergency earlier. I messed up,” before a colleague says, “Nah, man, you did the best you could.”

Multiple reports regarding situations where collisions were narrowly avoided at LaGuardia were filed in the two years leading up to Sunday’s deadly crash, according to CNN’s review of the reporting system. The database allows aviation industry members to anonymously raise safety concerns that will be reviewed by a team of safety analysts. That team is responsible for alerting the Federal Aviation Administration of any hazards, though individual details of the reports have not necessarily been verified by regulators.

One report from December 2024, as reviewed by the outlet, describes how a plane came dangerously close to another aircraft as the air traffic control tower was seemingly “unaware of what was happening.”

Months before, in July 2024, “ground control issued a stop command just in time” before a similar close call.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and FAA will lead an investigation into Sunday’s collision, the FAA confirmed in a statement. During a press conference on Monday, Port Authority’s executive director, Kathryn Garcia, said investigators will consider the speed the plane was moving and air traffic control staffing, among other factors, the BBC reported.