By Alison Sider, Jacob Passy and Dean Seal
Some of flying's biggest dangers are on the ground.
Between 2021 and 2025, there have been 26 runway incidents that the Federal Aviation Administration considers the most serious type where a collision was narrowly avoided, according to federal data that covers both commercial and private flights. The Sunday collision between an Air Canada regional jet into an emergency truck at New York's LaGuardia Airport is the tragedy aviation authorities have sought to prevent.
Another 52 runway incidents had "a significant potential for collision," data show. Those two categories of incidents were down in 2024 and 2025 compared with prior years, after a spate of alarming close calls at airports in Austin, Texas, New York and Boston in 2023.
There was a close call at Newark Liberty International Airport last week, when an Alaska Air plane flew over a FedEx freighter when both were attempting to land on crossing runways at the same time.
Sunday's accident comes at a moment of reckoning for U.S. aviation safety, long viewed as the global gold standard. Last year's midair collision of an American Airlines regional jet and a military helicopter over the Potomac River killed 67 people.
Regulators have tried for decades to stamp out hazards leading to close-call incidents at airports -- from poor communications to poorly lit airfields to adequate staffing to oversee air traffic. The Department of Transportation is working to overhaul the air-traffic control system, seeking billions of dollars of additional funding to upgrade antiquated systems.
The FAA has said its goal is zero serious close calls and has pushed to address those risks in recent years. It has been installing new systems to allow air-traffic controllers to better track the movement of aircraft on the ground, and to alert controllers when a runway isn't available for departing or arriving planes.
At airports where ground surveillance technology isn't in place, controllers have largely relied on visually separating planes to prevent collisions, said Hassan Shahidi, president and chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on global aviation safety.
LaGuardia has a ground radar system to track movement of aircraft and vehicles on the ground. National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said Monday that investigators will get a readout from that system to determine what was visible on the controller's display and will analyze what alerts the controller may have received.
Congested airports are another concern. Airlines have concentrated in a few dozen commercial airports for efficiency's sake, said Mary Schiavo, an aviation attorney who previously served as the inspector general for the Transportation Department. Itineraries aren't evenly distributed throughout the day. As a result, runways can become congested.
LaGuardia is one of three airports where the FAA already restricts the number of runway slots to constrain capacity, alongside New York's JFK International Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The agency monitors air-traffic schedules at some other airports, including Chicago O'Hare International Airport, San Francisco International Airport and Newark.
It is also compact -- squeezed into a relatively small plot along the East River. Located between two other big airports serving the region, the airspace can be complicated too.
"At some point somebody has to say we've reached the limit for old airports like LaGuardia," Schiavo said.
Before Sunday's collision at LaGuardia, storms had delayed dozens of flights that left air-traffic workers at the airport handling more than double the number of flights -- 70 instead of 31 -- than initially scheduled, according to data from analytics firm Cirium.
A preliminary analysis of air-traffic control audio suggests the same controller cleared the jet to land and simultaneously authorized the firetruck to cross the taxiway, according to two audio forensic experts interviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The controller later radioed commands for the truck to stop.
Homendy declined to comment at a press briefing Monday.
Some air-traffic control facilities have faced staffing shortages, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said LaGuardia is relatively well-staffed with 33 certified controllers, which is four shy of its target.
When asked whether there was only one controller on duty at the time of the crash, Duffy said that was false. It is common for controllers to manage multiple flights at a time, tasked with keeping adequate space between planes. At busy airports more than one plane may takeoff or land within a minute.
Write to Alison Sider at alison.sider@wsj.com, Jacob Passy at jacob.passy@wsj.com and Dean Seal at dean.seal@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 24, 2026 14:13 ET (18:13 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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