NEW YORK — A fatal collision between a regional jet and a fire truck on a LaGuardia Airport runway late Sunday night was entirely preventable and almost certainly the result of a breakdown in communication between air traffic controllers, aviation safety experts said Monday.

The Air Canada-operated Jazz Aviation flight from Montreal slammed into the emergency vehicle on Runway 4 just before midnight, killing both the pilot and co-pilot and injuring dozens of people on board. The aircraft had been properly cleared to land and therefore “owned that runway,” experts emphasized.

“Once that aircraft was cleared to land … it owned that runway,” Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation (1990–1996), told The New York Post. “There’s just no way around that.”

Schiavo and other specialists pointed to clear confusion between the tower’s local control and ground control functions. Audio recordings released after the crash captured one controller openly admitting he “messed up.” Investigators believe a single controller may have been handling both positions simultaneously during the quieter late-night hours.

“There are two parts here — there’s the control in the tower, also called local control, and there’s ground control. And those two air traffic control entities are supposed to coordinate with each other,” Schiavo explained. “So clearly they either did not coordinate, or they did and were just wrong. Giving a firetruck clearance to cross the runway after an aircraft has been cleared to land is a clear error.”

Retired air traffic controller Harvey Sconick, who spent more than 38 years with the Federal Aviation Administration, offered a blunt assessment: the controller “went brain-dead for a minute.”

“There’s no explanation I can give you that would make any sense why the controller would cross those vehicles, knowing that there’s a runway, that there’s an airplane flaring out to land,” Sconick said. He added that the fire truck driver should have immediately questioned the clearance upon hearing the landing aircraft.

“Unless the fire truck driver fell asleep, he would have heard that there was an airplane landing on that runway,” Sconick noted. “And when the controller cleared him to cross the runway, he would have said, ‘Hey, are you sure you want us to cross? You’ve got a guy landing.’”

The truck was responding to a separate incident on another aircraft when it was authorized to cross the active runway — a decision experts described as a fundamental violation of standard safety protocols.

Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport, confirmed that all vehicles on runways or taxiways must receive explicit clearance from the control tower.

“The procedure is always in deference to the control tower,” Garcia told reporters Monday. “They have to get clearance from the tower to move on our runways or our taxiways.”

The Jazz Aviation regional jet was carrying 72 passengers and four crew members. At the moment of impact, the aircraft was traveling at approximately 24 mph. The front of the jet was mangled beyond recognition, with the cockpit completely destroyed.

A female flight attendant was miraculously ejected through the shattered nose of the plane while still strapped in her seat. Port Authority police officers pulled her from the wreckage and rushed her to the hospital. In total, 41 people — including two officers who had been riding on the rescue vehicle — were hospitalized.

Haunting photographs taken Monday morning showed the devastated cockpit resting on the runway, a grim testament to the violence of the low-speed but catastrophic collision.

Schiavo drew a sobering parallel to the January 2025 American Airlines collision with a military helicopter over the Potomac River that killed 67 people. She described that earlier tragedy as a clear case of “dereliction of duty” by the FAA and warned that similar systemic failures may be at play here.

“I’m afraid we might see some of that same thing here,” Schiavo said. “I think they already see this is another case of the FAA simply not doing their job, not coordinating that staffing. It’s tragic, and it’s sad. But … I’m not surprised that we have another coordination problem with air traffic control.”

The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA have launched a full investigation. While the exact sequence of radio transmissions and staffing levels at the time of the crash remain under scrutiny, both experts and airport officials agree on one central point: the Air Canada jet had the absolute right of way, and the decision to allow the fire truck onto the runway after landing clearance was issued was a critical — and ultimately fatal — mistake.