NEW YORK — Air traffic controllers at New York’s LaGuardia Airport may have been distracted at the time of a runway collision that killed two people Sunday night, according to a recording of audio from the air traffic tower that has been reviewed by The New York Times.

Investigators were working Monday to determine how the Air Canada jet and Port Authority fire truck collided. The jet was landing and the fire truck had been responding to a separate incident on another plane.

Several minutes after the collision Sunday night, a controller at the airport told the pilot of a Frontier jet that the airport was closed until further notice and that “we were dealing with an emergency earlier,” according to air traffic control audio posted on the site LiveATC.net, which was reviewed by the Times.

The collision injured dozens of people and shut down one of the busiest domestic airports in the region. It appeared to be the first fatal accident at LaGuardia since 1992. More than 12 hours after the accident the plane, a Bombardier jet, remained on the runway with its nose sheared off.

Before the crash, flight attendants warned of a possible emergency landing, and after the impact passengers were left to organize their own escape, said Rebecca Liquori, 35, a nurse from South Baldwin, New York.

The pilots were dead and at least one flight attendant was missing. The escape slides did not activate, so passengers had to scramble over the wings to safety.

“The flight attendant that was in the front, she got ejected from the plane,” Liquori said. “So we really did not have direction.”

The disruption was expected to ripple across the region and the nation at the start of the workweek, with hundreds of flights canceled as of Monday morning. New York City officials urged drivers to avoid the area around LaGuardia, warning of road closures and traffic delays.

Forty-one passengers and crew members were taken to the hospital, Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the airport operator, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said at a news conference early Monday. She said 32 of them had been released and that some of the others had been seriously injured.

Two officers in the fire truck were among those hospitalized and were in stable condition, Garcia said. The truck was responding to a call from another aircraft whose pilot had reported an issue with odor in the cabin, she said.

The collision, which occurred around 11:40 p.m. Sunday, involved Air Canada Express Flight 8646, which had departed from Montreal and landed at LaGuardia late Sunday. The CRJ-900 jet was operated by Jazz Aviation LP, which said in a statement that a preliminary passenger list indicated the flight was carrying 72 passengers and four crew members.

After it landed, the plane’s ground speed slowed from roughly 151 mph to roughly 24 mph within a minute, according to FlightRadar24, an online service that tracks flight data.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Liam Stack, Christine Chung, Dakota Santiago, Stella Chu and Karoun Demirjian/Victor J. Blue
c. 2026 The New York Times Company