BOSTON (WHDH) – As the investigation begins inot a fatal crash on the runway at New York’s LaGuardia Airport over the weekend, aviation experts say crews will be looking closely at the factors that led to the crash.
“Particularly in an airport like that, LaGuardia, it was raining, a lot of reflection off the water, you just see a sea of lights, but the assumption for the flight crew would be that the runway was cleared for them and it had been clear to land, as it certainly indicates that it was,” J. F. Johnson said, Aviation Accident Consultant.
“Weather was probably obscured, raining, light snow perhaps at the time, night, a lot of glare, a lot of lights because the airport was very busy at that hour, a lot of arriving and deptartment aircraft, so again, sometimes they can catch an error by looking, sometimes they miss it. In this case, unfortnately, they missed it,” Tom Kinton said, Aviation Expert.
Roughly 70-passengers and four crew members were on board the Jazz Aviation flight operating on behalf of Air Canada.
While attempting to land, the plane struck an airport fire truck that was crossing the runway.
The pilot and co-pilot were killed.
About 40-passengers and crew members were hurt, as well as two crew members onboard the truck. Experts say that now, investigators will be looking at every factor that could have played a part in the deadly collision.
“Airport with high density traffic, intersecting runways, a very small geographical footprint if you will, to run these type of operations and then the task saturation that may have been involved in terms of air traffic control attempting to control an emergency in progress” Johnson said. “And then to cross and intersection runway which was accepting arrival traffic, so a lot of moving parts in a very short period of time evolved into a very complex situation where human factors and ultimately human errors can occur.”
Those experts say once investigators determine the cause of the crash, regulators will be looking for ways to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
“There’ll be a lot of eyes on this to investigate to what went wrong and if it’s beyond air traffic controller error, or even if it is, maybe put other procedures in place that would add to safety layers, layers of safety for this, in order for it not to happen in the future,” Kinton said.
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