For years, pilots have complained about controller miscommunication and close calls with ground vehicles at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, according to reports filed in publicly available databases. CBS News reviewed dozens of reports dating back three decades about the airport, where a deadly collision occurred earlier this week.
“Please do something,” an airline captain who experienced what he deemed was a close call with another aircraft wrote last summer in NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System, where reports are filed anonymously and can take months to be posted publicly. The captain reported that air traffic control failed to provide guidance about a departing flight that crossed their runway about 10 seconds before he landed.
“The pace of operations is building in LGA. The controllers are pushing the line. On thunderstorm days, LGA is starting to feel like DCA did before the accident there,” the captain wrote in the anonymous report, using the airport codes for LaGuardia and Ronald Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C. Earlier that year, an Army helicopter and a regional American Airlines flight collided in midair near Reagan National, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft.
The same captain complained that a LaGuardia runway status light system that should be visible to departing aircraft did not appear to be operational. That system is intended to reduce the risk of a runway incursion.
In 2001, the pilot of an Airbus A320 reported narrowly missing a snowplow while taking off from Runway 4, the same runway that was the scene of this week’s deadly collision between an Air Canada Express regional jet and a fire truck. The pilot estimated his aircraft cleared the snowplow by 50-75 feet.
Just as the plane was lifting off, the pilot noticed the snowplow’s flashing yellow lights and then spotted two other vehicles, the report says. The pilot noted the controller was working both tower and ground traffic: “The same [controller] shouldn’t work both frequencies.”
Reuters/Eduardo Munoz 
A CBS News review of the Federal Aviation Administration’s official database of runway incursions identified at least 132 incidents since 2000, including 17 involving maintenance, snow and other support vehicles being on runways when they should not have been. There were six reports in total in 2025, including one involving a pedestrian on a runway and one involving a ground vehicle. The rest involved multiple aircraft.
That does not include reports to NASA’s anonymous safety reporting system. CBS News found at least 122 anonymous safety reports — by flight crews, controllers and other personnel — of ground conflicts and incursions since 2000. At least 17 of those reports involved ground support vehicles.
While many of the incidents appear to be documented in both systems, some are reported only to one of the systems.
One such incident in the FAA’s ground incursion database details a close call at LaGuardia between an Embraer 190 passenger jet starting its takeoff roll and an airport vehicle in September 2015, where the vehicle crossed through the intersection of Runway 13 and Runway 22. Air traffic control stopped the airliner’s takeoff, but the vehicles were about 1,300 feet apart at their closest point.
“Ground Control issued a stop command just in time”
A July 2024 report to NASA from a first officer details a near collision between their aircraft and another aircraft that had just landed on Runway 22, after controllers cleared the first officer’s lane to taxi across the runway.
“We were extremely close to the landing aircraft” when ground control told them to stop, the first officer said in the report. The report notes, “Ground Control issued a stop command just in time.”
The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating an Oct. 1 ground collision between two regional jets on a taxiway at LaGuardia, where the wing of one regional jet hit the cockpit of another airliner in a slow-speed collision. One person was taken to the hospital.
Other reports are less serious but describe confusing or potentially dangerous scenarios, including controllers issuing complicated taxi instructions to pilots still actively engaged in landing.
“The worst example of airport vehicle driving I have seen”
Several NASA reports include accounts of airliners having to slam on the brakes to avoid ground vehicles at LaGuardia. In a 2016 incident, an airline captain described a close call with a fuel truck that forced the flight crew to brake so aggressively that a flight attendant in the cabin fell and suffered a minor injury.
“It was the worst example of airport vehicle driving I have seen in a 30 year aviation career. The ground controller asked us if the truck had cut us off and said he witnessed the event. We said it had cut us off,” the pilot reported.
In 2021, a pilot reported a maintenance pickup failed to yield to his airliner as it was turning into the gate, forcing an “abrupt stop to avoid a collision.”