Baldwin resident and LaGuardia crash survivor Rebecca Liquori remembers pilots: 'Their last actions were heroic'

Rebecca Liquori heard the grinding brakes of Air Canada Flight 8646 as it sped down Runway 4 at LaGuardia Airport. That sound was the result of a final, heroic act by two pilots who were killed when the plane crashed into a Port Authority fire truck Sunday night and injured dozens of people, she said.

"Their swift action prevented the impact to be even bigger and prevented even more fatalities," Liquori, 35, told Newsday outside her Baldwin home Tuesday morning. "Their last actions were heroic."

Investigators are analyzing flight data recorders from the plane, which took 72 passengers and four crew members from Montreal to LaGuardia Airport, and the role of the air traffic controller who directed the Port Authority vehicle onto the tarmac. The crash occurred around 11:40 p.m. Antoine Forest, 30, of Quebec, was identified Monday as one of the pilots. Media outlets on Tuesday identified Mackenzie Gunther as the other. 

The front of the Bombardier jet was mangled in the crash and some passengers were bloodied and injured. Liquori was jolted forward and then slammed back in her seat as the plane came to a rest. 

She immediately thought about her family. 

"Am I never going to see my husband? Am I never going to see my sons?" she recalled thinking. "I just thought, ‘I don’t want it to end like this.’ "

She said she waited moments for directions but then knew she needed to act. Liquori opened the emergency exit near her seat and helped guide passengers to the wing of the plane, nervous it could combust into flames.

"There was no slide, so we jumped off the wing of the plane," she said. The passengers worked together to get off the plane and were comforting one another when emergency authorities began arriving on scene, she said.

While she stood on the tarmac, Liquori said she immediately felt grateful to the pilots and their attempts to stop the plane.

"I want the heroes' families to know, in the middle of their grief, that I'm so thankful," Liquori said. "The pilots really saved all of us." 

When the crash happened, an automatic message sent an alert to Liquori’s emergency contacts — her husband, mother and brother — alerting them that she had been in a crash. There were tense moments for her family between that text, sent at 11:39 p.m., and when she was able to tell them she was safe. Her husband, Matthew Liquori, told Newsday he endured anxious moments after he received the message. 

"It’s pretty tough when stuff like that happens, the heart sinks. It’s scary," he said. Relief flooded over him after he found she was safe and did what she could to guide passengers to safety. 

The moment Liquori got to hug her sons, ages 2 and 4, she felt like she "won the lottery."

"It was the best feeling ever," she said, just minutes after she carried her oldest son onto his bus for school. "I’m still giving them extra hugs."

The return flight made a regular trip to visit family in Canada turn "into a nightmare." She said she doesn’t plan on getting on another plane anytime soon. The heartbreak of the lives lost in the crash and the dozens of others who are injured is still raw.

"It was just tragic all around," Liquori said. "I don’t know when I’ll get on a flight in the future."