Deadly LaGuardia plane-truck collision

All right. Michael, thank you very much. Gregory Feith is a former senior air safety investigator for the NTSB, that's the National Transportation Safety Board, and joins us now to try and make sense of this. Gregory, good morning. We should be clear. It's very early in the investigation, but our Kris Van Cleave reports that the emergency vehicle was granted permission by the control tower to cross the live runway, and that was despite a plane coming in for landing. So how does a mistake like this happen? Well, one of the things that the NTSB will be looking at is the controller's workload and of course, situational awareness. That is, was this controller aware that he had cleared that airplane to land on the runway? Did he actually see the aircraft on the runway prior to clearing the fire truck? And it's obvious from the audio that's out there that he recognized he had made a mistake, tried to get the fire truck to stop by yelling "Stop, stop, stop. Truck 1, stop." Unfortunately, it was so late in that ground roll for the Air Canada aircraft that there was no way to avoid a collision.

And as you lay that out, we know that staffing at air traffic control towers has been a long standing issue in American aviation. We can all think back to the crash outside Washington at DCA, where the NTSB found that the air traffic controls degraded performance led to a military chopper hitting a regional jet. So what should the focus of this investigation be? Does this all come down to possibly air control staffing? Well, I think that's only one part of it, Errol. The biggest thing is communication. And what was the controller doing? Like you brought up and just like what happened at Washington National, typically at night when arrival rates go down, staffing goes down. So the question will be, was this particular controller working multiple positions? Was he working ground and local control, which controls the aircraft inbound for that runway? Again, it's obvious that he was talking to another airplane, the frontier aircraft. He had just cleared the fire truck, and then something drew his attention back to the runway to realize that the aircraft was still on the runway in the tail end of their landing roll with the fire truck rolling across the runway. So it's all about situational awareness distraction. This is human factors. This is what the board, I think, will be focused on, is what was the controller doing? How much of the workload, was there fatigue involved since it was a nighttime operation? And these controllers work varying shifts. They work a morning, a mid, and a night. So fatigue will definitely be one of those questions that needs to be answered. Yeah, at least two deaths from this. So disturbing to see. But, Mr. Feith, thank you for walking us through what the focus should be. We appreciate your time.