00:13Right before the impact, we felt something, maybe like an emergency break that was pulled or some
00:20kind of hard stop before we hit the fire truck in front of us. But prior to that, there was
00:26nothing out of the ordinary that I had noticed or felt. And honestly, what the pilots did there,
00:31I believe saved many lives. It is exceedingly rare. I've been a pilot for 15 years and I've
00:40never seen a plane in a ground vehicle collide on a runway before. Pilots didn't have a lot of time
00:46to react because they're still in the landing phase, which case they're really focused on the
00:51runway. It's like you got a car going a hundred miles an hour and it's 50 feet away from a
00:57brick
00:57wall. You just got that real split seconds.
01:09It sounded like the firefighters were following the controller's instructions for crossing the
01:15runway. It's just the controller made a mistake and not piecing the whole thing together where you have
01:21a fire truck crossing an active runway with a plane that has landed and is finishing. It's what we call
01:26the rollout phase of the landing. And so, yeah, it was just a chain of events.
01:36But I think it also kind of shines a spotlight on an area that has gotten attention before,
01:42and that is our shortage of air traffic controllers. A lot of classes are full, but it takes a while
01:48for controllers to really become experienced before they're placed into busy airports like LaGuardia.
01:52So I think it really underscores the importance of ensuring that our current air traffic controllers
01:58are rested. They're not overworked. They're not overly stressed because many of them have been
02:04working six-day shifts. They've been working longer than their regular shift, and that's where
02:09they start getting fatigue, and that's where mishaps start to occur.
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