Are you safer in an airborne jetliner than one on the ground?

At Chicago’s airports and across the country safety experts say they operate on the “Swiss cheese” principle: there may be a few holes in the protocols and procedures, but you never want all the holes to align at once.

They did Sunday night at New York LaGuardia, when a landing Air Canada plane collided with a fire truck crossing the runway in the kind of collision federal regulators have been working to prevent for years.

What happened at LaGuardia is the most serious result of something that occurred 1,600 times last year, according to FAA records. Runway incursions, typically defined as aircraft or ground vehicles too close to one another, sometimes result in a collision and death.

An FAA alert nearly a year ago set a “goal of zero serious close calls,” urging airports to install transponder trackers on airfield vehicles.

Laguardia didn’t, according to authorities, and that gear would have warned of a crash in the making.

“They’re just not going to do it if there’s no funding for it,” SAID Randy Klatt, flight safety office at the Foundation for Aviation Safety. “They don’t have the money to afford it and it’s not required, so it’s just not going to happen. So you have a situation, as we saw Sunday night at LaGuardia.”

What about O’Hare and Midway?

As NBC5 Investigates first reported on Tuesday, this aviation department manual in November states “all vehicles must have an operating transponder to access or drive” on critical runways or taxiways. From catering trucks to fuel providers, de-icers and emergency equipment.

Chicago Fire Department officials say of their fleet of 64 trucks and other emergency vehicles at both O’Hare and Midway, a little more than half are equipped with transponders.

That’s not enough to protect the public according to former O’Hare airline captain Randy Klatt, now with the Foundation for Aviation Safety.

“All kinds of people have to come together to make sure this all works. And when there’s a minor deviation in one place or a distraction like happened at LaGuardia where there was another aircraft with an emergency going on,” said Klatt “The Swiss cheese model starts to form. You know, you have all these individual pieces with all those little holes in a thing of Swiss cheese, and you got to maneuver them all around to get a hole to go all the way through. The vast majority of airports across the country, we’re still relying on the human element, the air traffic controllers, to keep track of everything that’s going on and to fix those problems before they occur.”

We asked Klatt if for the flying public in 2026, are you safer in the air than you are on the airfield on the ground?

“Well, the potential is there in both,” said Klatt. “As soon as you go airborne, now you got that whole third dimension you have to worry about. I would say that the odds of a collision may be more prevalent on the ground.”

A city Aviation Department official tells the NBC Chicago investigative team that 162 ground vehicles at O’Hare and 76 at Midway are equipped with transponders for movement within the most critical runway zones.

Other vehicles that operate on the airfield do not have transponders, but the city has not yet provided that number. So, for now, we only know that half of airport fire vehicles are not radar trackable, and they do cross active runways.