‘Like the plane got cut in half’: LaGuardia crash that killed two pilots now under investigation. 12 hours ago. Sakshi VenkatramanLaGuardia Airport. Air Canada flight AC8646’s collision late Sunday with a fire truck on a LaGuardia Airport runway killed the plane’s two pilots, injured dozens of others, and left passengers and witnesses stunned and stranded.. “We were literally like 100 metres away,” said 23-year-old Leo Medina, who was onboard another plane on the tarmac when the crash happened. “It was like the plane got cut in half.”. He told the BBC his plane then returned to the gate and that he had been waiting in the New York airport for more than 12 hours, sleeping on the floor on a bed of jackets.. In addition to killing the two pilots, the incident, which happened at 23:40 local time on Sunday (03:40 GMT on Monday), injured 41 people who were taken to hospital, some with serious injuries, and shut LaGuardia until Monday afternoon.. After visiting the crash site, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said he was reminded of the importance of wearing seat belts – on an aircraft or in any other mode of transportation.. “As you see from last night, they do save lives,” Duffy said during a news conference.. Québec native Antoine Forest, 30, was identified as one of the Air Canada pilots who died in the collision, according to Canadian media reports. The other pilot has not yet been named.. “These were two young men at the start of their career, so it’s an absolute tragedy,” Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) administrator Bran Bedford said.. Passenger Rebecca Liquori, who was on the plane arriving from Montreal when it hit the truck, told News12 Long Island there was a loud “boom” just after it landed.. “As we were descending, we hit a lot of turbulence,” she said. “Then we landed very roughly… Everyone felt it. It was like the plane jolted and you heard the pilot try to brake trying to prevent the collision.”. “As you heard the brake, a couple seconds later it was just a very loud boom,” she added. “Everybody jolted out of their seats.”. Liquori described passengers helping each other slide down a wing to get out.. “I’m just happy to be alive,” she said. “I would have never pictured a one-hour flight that I’ve done countless times … ending like this.”. In audio from the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia, a staff member can be heard saying: “‘Truck One, stop, stop, stop!” in the seconds before the crash.. The fire truck had been called out minutes earlier to another plane that “reported an issue with odour”, according to Port Authority executive director Kathryn Garcia.. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani described it as a “tragic collision” and said the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) – an independent federal agency – was investigating.. “I am grateful to our first responders, whose swift actions saved lives,” he said.. NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy confirmed on Monday that it had begun an investigation, with i
