LaGuardia, other area airports getting crash-prevention transponders

Safety equipment absent at LaGuardia Airport last month when an Air Canada Express jet landed and collided with a Port Authority fire truck will be installed there and at other area airports, officials told Newsday.

The Port Authority will install transponders on first responder vehicles at LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark Liberty airports, Port Authority chief communications officer James Allen told Newsday Tuesday in an emailed statement.

The move comes more than a month after the LaGuardia runway collision between Air Canada Flight 8646 out of Montreal and a Port Authority fire truck that killed the plane’s two pilots and injured dozens of passengers and crew members.

As the Air Canada Express  flight was on final approach to LaGuardia's Runway 4, an air traffic controller authorized the fire truck involved in the crash to cross the runway to tend to an unrelated emergency call near Terminal B, Newsday has previously reported. A firefighter in another vehicle radioed for the truck to “stop stop stop” and the air traffic controller similarly tried to halt the vehicle that already entered the runway, and the plane’s path.

The airport’s crash detection system was unable to track the fire truck's path and alert air traffic controllers to the crash because the emergency vehicle was not equipped with a transponder, the National Transportation Safety Board’s said in its preliminary report on the crash released last Thursday. While LaGuardia is equipped with a crash prevention system, it did not “predict a potential conflict with the landing airplane” and warn air traffic controllers, federal investigators said in their report. Without transponders, they added, the system could not determine the firetruck’s fire truck's position near the runway and “was unable to correlate the track of the airplane with the track” of the truck. 

The federal agency will release a final report on the crash within 12 to 24 months.

The Port Authority has invested in “safety technology" but LaGuardia's detection system did not provide the control tower an alert regarding the March 22 collision, Allen said. He added in the statement “transponder technology can provide an additional layer of visibility on top of existing surface-surveillance systems that already track ground movements.”

In May 2025, "the FAA issued updated guidance encouraging broader use of transponder technology," Allen said.

A pilot program started in December at Newark Liberty was "already underway … prior to this incident," Allen said. “We will be expanding that capability across our airports, building on the technology already in place.”

He did not say when the transponders will be installed.