Impact caused massive damage
The scene on the runway at LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night after a crash between a regional Air Canada plane and a firefighting vehicle. Credit: Newsday/James Carbone
For the Air Canada jet, crashing into the firefighting truck "would have been like hitting a wall," said Michael McCormick, a former head of the FAA radar facility in Ronkonkoma who has participated in NTSB-led crash investigations.
"A fire truck is going to have 1,000 gallons of water on it. So the thing is going to be massive and weigh a lot."
He said the impact of the collision as well as the damage to the cockpit area, which made the aircraft tail-heavy, caused the plane's nose to lift into the air.
The images from the scene show catastrophic damage to the jet’s cockpit.
McCormick is now a professor of air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University's Florida campus.
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