An airport firefighting vehicle that collided with a Mitsubishi CL-600 on a runway at New York’s LaGuardia Airport lacked a transponder that would have allowed air traffic controllers to detect its location before the March 22 fatal collision, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says.
The airport surface detection equipment, Model X (ASDE-X), which tracked the movement of aircraft and ground vehicles did not generate an alert in the air traffic control (ATC) tower before the collision, which killed the two pilots of Air Canada Flight 8646 and seriously injured another crewmember, three passengers, and two people in the firefighting vehicle; 33 passengers on the airplane received minor injuries.
The NTSB’s investigation of the accident is continuing, but the April 23 preliminary report noted that the airport had ASDE-X, which gathered data from “surface surveillance radar, multilateration sensors, automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast (AD…
