MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Federal investigators have some early findings about the crash at New York's LaGuardia Airport earlier this week. An Air Canada regional jet collided with a fire truck as it was landing on Sunday night. Both pilots were killed, and dozens of passengers were injured. The National Transportation Safety Board has been looking into how the jet and truck wound up on the same runway at the same time. That early assessment shows a runway safety system did not alert air traffic controllers about the potential collision. Reporter Steve Kastenbaum has been following this from New York. Good morning, Steve.
STEVE KASTENBAUM: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So what do we know about this safety system and how it's supposed to work?
KASTENBAUM: Well, this is the first time I've heard about this system. It's called ASDE-X, and it combines radar, GPS and aircraft transponder signals to track planes and vehicles that are on the runways and on the tarmacs at an airport. And it displays those positions on a screen in a control tower, and it's supposed to generate an alert if it detects a potential conflict on the tarmac, like when a vehicle and a plane are heading toward each other. The runway conflict alert did not activate before this crash. NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy explained why.
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JENNIFER HOMENDY: In order for ASDE-X to work well, you have to know where ground vehicles and aircraft are. So in this case, that ground - that vehicle did not have a transponder.
KASTENBAUM: And because of that, on Sunday night, the controller in the tower at LaGuardia did not have real-time information on the fire truck's exact location.
MARTIN: Is that safety system required at airports like LaGuardia, and are all vehicles supposed to have transponders?
KASTENBAUM: Well, this is kind of a gray area. It's not required everywhere. The FAA has installed it selectively at some busy, complex airports like LaGuardia. About three dozen airports have it in place. They say it's a safety enhancement. It's not mandated. And here's the thing - controllers are required to use it to augment visual observations, not replace what they can see from the tower. There's no blanket federal regulation that requires all vehicles at airports to carry transponders. They use ground radar to provide some details about trucks and cars on the tarmac, and then they also defer to local requirements regarding those vehicles. Tapes that the NTSB investigators reviewed from LaGuardia's tower showed that controllers could see some details about those vehicles, but not precise locations of every truck and car.
MARTIN: And what do we know about the controllers that night?
KASTENBAUM: Well, there were some conflicting reports on staffing in the tower Sunday night early on. They did confirm that there were two controllers in the tower at the time of the crash, but the NTSB said there are still questions about who was performing what duties at the time of the crash.
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HOMENDY: We do have logs, but there's also conflicting information, including dates and times, on the logs. So now we have to go through that and rectify some of those inconsistencies.
KASTENBAUM: Now, we do know that the control tower did communicate with the truck to try to get the stop. The NTSB is reviewing whether those radio communications were clear and acknowledged by the truck driver. And they're also looking at the controller workload and the decisions that they made, the sequence of decisions within the tower.
MARTIN: So this is early days. This is the early stage of the investigation. What are they focusing on next?
KASTENBAUM: Well, they still have a lot of work to do. They have to analyze the cockpit voice and data recorders. They're doing that now. They're looking at air traffic control procedures specifically at LaGuardia Airport and staffing. They're looking at vehicle access rules and equipment requirements at the airport, and they're looking at things like the chain of events. They say there wasn't one single failure. It's looking like there were overlapping failures. They should have a preliminary finding in few weeks, but the full report could take a year or more to come out.
MARTIN: Wow. That's a long way to go here. That's reporter Steve Kastenbaum in New York. Steve, thank you.
KASTENBAUM: My pleasure.
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