Investigators in the U.S. and Canada have cautioned that it is too early to determine a cause and that several safeguards would have had to fail for a disaster of this magnitude to occur.
In aviation safety, this is known as the Swiss Cheese Model, which compares the holes in stacked slices of cheese to weaknesses in different layers of safety defences. The holes rarely all line up. But when they do, an error can pass through.
One of the errors now drawing concern from Canadian aviation safety experts is runway incursions, like the one leading up to the collision at LaGuardia.
In 2010, the year the TSB added runway incursions to its watchlist, Nav Canada recorded 334 of them. In its 2025 financial year, Nav Canada recorded 612 runway incursions at Canadian airports between Sept. 1 and Aug. 31, according to data provided to CBC News.
A good place to start would be putting transponders on ground vehicles at airports like the planes have
They do. ASDE-X. Some agency in NY fucked up. There is a transponder based collision avoidance system for ground vehicles but some assholes didn’t put it in the firetrucks, because the fire service is regulated partly by LaGuardia, partly by NYFD, and for some stupid reason, the NY Port authority.
I had an even simpler idea, why if there was not just some kind of automated signage on the taxiways into runways that signalled if a plane was imminently landing, like, iunno, some kind of red light?
Pssh… next you’ll be suggesting mandatory training that specifies checking both ways before crossing.
AFAIK ground vehicles are supposed to stop and ask for clearance before crossing runways already. In this case the ATC granted permission to cross.
Plus adding the transponder mean the truck will also show up in the aircraft’s ADS-B system so they’re not relying solely on ATC for that info.
Right but a “hey there’s a fucking plane landing on this runway” light at least adds another guard on top of the human element
Not nearly as simple as you might think.
A transponder is essentially a coded radio transmitter, which is subject to the same issues as any other radio transmission.
Aircraft transponders work well because in the sky there are few obstacles, however at ground level, there are thousands of obstacles, each of which affects such radio signals.
For a sense of comparison, think about getting good WiFi coverage in your home for all your devices, now do the same for an airport, where moving massive sources of interference are littered around the field.
Listen to some ATC radio frequencies and you’ll get some sense of just how fragile radio communication really is.
Source: I’m a licensed radio amateur.
There are already ADS-B transponders that are designed for vehicles, and the FAA has been recommending them for a while.
Plus airports are big, flat pieces of land with little in the way of transmissions especially on the big, flat runways and taxiways.
There were many points of failure. Poor weather, lack of ADSE on the truck, understaffed ATC on a highly fatigued midnight shift already flagged by the FAA.
But instead of solutions, bigballs made his cuts at DOGE. In a just world, that should have been Elon’s jet crashing into the truck.
Hell, LaGuardia has ASDE-X installed. The fire truck in question did not have a transponder, rending a significant portion of the system pretty useless in this case.
It’s unclear whether any of the ground vehicles at LaGuardia are equipped with the transponders, or at least it was unclear the last I heard.
I imagine it’s going to become a requirement for ground vehicles to have transponders now, at least at the big airports.
It already is. Lots of finger pointing, but LGA is a overcapacity shithole airport with poor infrastructure regulation.
Jennifer Homendy at FAA has been warning the government for two years and she’s being ignored as hard as Tony Fauci in 2019.
There was an FAA warning that LGA midnight shift ATC was understaffed and over fatigued. They will probably fire her for being competent.
But will the transponder be able to tell the difference between a vehicle being on a runway and one just holding short of it, waiting? Will it be able to tell in advance that the vehicle will start moving onto the runway after the plane has already committed to its trajectory on the runway and can’t change it anymore like it seems to have happened there?
Yes, ADS-B on planes can already tell a plane is holding on the taxiway. You can see this on flight tracking software which uses that data.
Every transponder is broadcasting position and velocity and broadcasting it in the clear, so other vehicles know the position of the transmitting one peer-to-peer.
It won’t necessarily stop a vehicle from crossing a runway, but it will sound an alarm if there’s a runway incursion and will give ATC better situational awareness and will show ground vehicles to pilots in the cockpit.
CQ CQ CQ
You rang?
