Former FAA Official to Newsmax: 3 Safety Failures Led to Airport Crash

Former Federal Aviation Administration Deputy Administrator Dan Elwell said Wednesday on Newsmax that the Air Canada jet and fire truck crash could not have resulted from a single breakdown, arguing that "at least three failures of the redundancies of the system" had to occur for the accident to happen.

Appearing on "Wake Up America," Elwell said the early focus should not be on fault but on how multiple layers of airport safety appear to have failed. He said the aviation system is built on overlapping protections specifically so that "a single failure in the system will not create a catastrophe like this."

"We shouldn't start examining and talking about blame here," Elwell said, adding that the priority should be understanding how the system operated in the moments before the crash.

The crash occurred late Sunday at New York's LaGuardia Airport, where an Air Canada Express CRJ-900 arriving from Montreal struck a fire truck that had been cleared to cross Runway 4 as the jet was landing.

The collision killed the pilot and first officer, injured dozens of other people aboard the plane and on the ground, and forced a temporary shutdown at one of the nation's busiest airports.

Investigators have said the truck lacked a transponder, the airport's surface-alert system failed to warn controllers in time, and it remains unclear whether the truck's crew heard last-second instructions to stop.

Elwell said the first layer was the controller's authorization for the truck to cross Runway 4. But he said that clearance alone should not have been enough to produce a deadly outcome because other safeguards were also supposed to intervene.

"What happens then is the trained driver looks both ways, just like we do when we go through an intersection," Elwell said, describing what he called one layer of protection built into normal airfield operations.

He said another safeguard is the runway warning system.

"The next layer is something we call runway edge lights or runway status lights," Elwell said.

Those lights, he said, are "built into the concrete at every point of crossing an active runway."

In the scenario he described, Elwell said the lights "would have been" red and the fire truck driver would have been trained to stop and contact the tower.

"I see red lights," Elwell said, describing the kind of response a driver should make.

The controller, he added, then could have responded, "Good catch, you know, stay right where you are."

Taken together, Elwell said, those missed checks point to a broader systems failure rather than a lone mistake.

"So there had to be, at my calculation, at least three failures of the redundancies of the system in the airport for that accident to happen," he said.

His comments came about 50 hours after the crash, as audio and video from the scene drew increasing attention. Elwell said the material was "chilling and accurate," but he repeatedly cautioned against reaching conclusions about blame before investigators complete their work.

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