Captain was 30 year old Antoine Forest from Quebec.
FO was Mackenzie Gunther from Ontario, I heard through the grapevine he was 22 but unconfirmed.
Bit more in the media about Forest because his family made a statement to CBC.
Side rant, I'm reminded of how much I hate media reporting on aviation because they get 30% of the info wrong. And of course in this age of AI driven BS there's even fake obituaries complete with pictures of the first person who comes on on google with that name, even though they live in a different country. Just had to wade through a pool of #### to find real info as I was panic searching to find out if it was the one friend of mine who's an RJ pilot that hadn't texted me back yet today.
Anyway, RIP to those brave aviators. They saved a lot of lives by not overreacting and doing something crazy with that plane. Heroes
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Towards the end of this video the La Guardia spokesperson says the report of only 1 controller in the tower is not accurate.
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These guys come in and it’s always a nice polite one. You serve them because you dont want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And THEY bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh, this is a Nazi bar now. And its too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
Threads like this make me really appreciative of CP as a place of discussion, where we have some really knowledge posters with some educated insight on the topic. Thanks Acey, btimbit and others for the perspective. Very hard to watch, can’t imagine what a terrifying experience that would be, and so tragic for the people working there and the family members of the deceased.
Agree 100%
I had nothing but anger directed at the individual who ####ed up and killed two pilots. Not a shred of empathy. Reading this thread made me realize how wrong that was. Just an awful heartbreaking tragedy for all involved.
Any thanks to all of you for doing what you do here. It helps me be better, often. It really does. I'm heartbroken about this tragedy.
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Heartbreaking story and feel for everyone involved. I can’t even begin to imagine the guilt that the air traffic controller must feel. Such a high pressure job at the best of times.
Condolences to the families.
I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet, but for generally pretty reasoned and fact based incident vids, blancolirio is one of the best. Still makes some mistakes and poor assumptions, but tries to deliver good information not trash for clicks.
Generally the US ATC system is good and trustworthy, but some airports really struggle with very high traffic and poor design (LaGuardia, Chicago O’hare, SFO immediately come to mind). And ATC, both some individual controllers as well as the systems in those places, have issues that should be addressed.
It will be interesting to find out contributing details to this event, but ultimately it was a simple and tragic error by the controller….often errors get caught by others involved before it gets to an accident. For airline crews we always look both ways when crossing a runway and make “clear left”, “clear right” calls to each other. I would assume it is the same for CFR (crash fire rescue) crews to do the same. But all it takes is one moment of inattentiveness, and the assumption that if they were cleared across it must be safe. Now those 2 errors compound into a tragic accident like this.
The crew in the RJ would have had almost no time to do anything, and the CFR crew realized the error too late as well.
Last edited by Ryan Coke; 03-23-2026 at 10:23 PM.
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the La Guardia spokesperson says the report of only 1 controller in the tower is not accurate.
When I was a controller it was generally one hour (or 90 min) on, and then one hour off. I have no clue how LaGuardia tower does things, but I would guess that there were 2-3 actual human beings in the tower, but still only one actively controlling ground/tower at the time of the incident.
NTSB guy knows these semantics, but saying "it's not accurate" is step 1 in what's going to be several months of authorities minimizing this incident and saying the system isn't broken.
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Location: Wondering when # became hashtag and not a number sign.
Exp:
This is purely anecdotal but at one point I was a de-icer at YYC long before the central facility was constructed.
There was a special license granted to some of us to be able to go gate to gate to spray planes before take off....and really to go anywhere else inside the the fences we needed to.
Anyhow the trucks we used were very similar to fire trucks even if a bit smaller. We would also fill them with the glycol to the point where we would easily weigh more than a lot of the jets we were spraying.
When driving around the grounds I was always looking forward and listening to control.....especially with the conditions. Lots of rain and lights everywhere is not an ideal combination.
I can certainly understand how the driver was not looking for the plane in this instance until it was far to late. And the pilot had zero chance to change what happened.
Really crappy confluence of events and circumstances.
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What I find odd is that a clearance to cross an active runway is given on the ground frequency, not tower. Isn't it the case in Canada that Tower has master control of the runway and to request crossing you have to key up Tower? Is this not common place in the USA? Having them on the same frequency as pilots would have allowed the pilots to listen in on activity on the runway and possibly recognize something was amiss and go-around.
What I find odd is that a clearance to cross an active runway is given on the ground frequency, not tower. Isn't it the case in Canada that Tower has master control of the runway and to request crossing you have to key up Tower? Is this not common place in the USA? Having them on the same frequency as pilots would have allowed the pilots to listen in on activity on the runway and possibly recognize something was amiss and go-around.
Yes, it is also the case in the US that tower owns the runways. However if one guy is working combined ground/tower, generally the frequencies would be simulcast so transmissions are heard on both of them and you're not constantly playing the "change to my frequency now" game, and you don't get 2 planes talking at the same time because they can't hear each other. In Edmonton I'm pretty sure we could combine a third of the damn country into a mega-frequency if you wanted to, and a guy over Whitehorse could talk to a guy over Churchill, MB.
When not combined, ground is allowed to cross guys over an active runway, it just has to be coordinated with the tower controller. They do it at YYZ right when landing 33L with overflow landers on 33R, ground will taxi 33L landers down 6L and hold them short of taxiway E, coordinate with tower if anybody is landing on 33R, then get them through the conflict area.
Super busy airports like ATL and ORD do no bother with this... it's "monitor tower on..." and he calls you when he's ready to get you over. Much lower ATC workload at the expense of the monitoring pilot having to make multiple radio frequency changes. They're also building as many end-around taxiways as they can to stop planes from crossing active runways but you can't do that at LGA because... LaGuardia.
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This is probably the most accurate analogy I've seen so far. These are relatively small jets that are very low to the ground. It's basically an extended private jet repurposed as an airliner. "Tank" is the only reasonable way to describe these fire trucks... they are solid as hell.
It's an airplane designed to be as light as possible vs a fire truck designed to be as sturdy as possible, it's no surprise who won the collision.
Gotta say the CRJ900 is a remarkably robust aircraft. It remained largely intact in this collision and it was the same type of aircraft the overturned in Toronto last winter on a hard landing, again remaining largely intact. Maybe too much Hollywood where you expect everything to go up in flames but a lot of people are alive today from those two incidents due to how well this aircraft is built.
