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1 1 (March 30, 2026)

handle is hein.crs/govetxw0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Collision at LaGuardia Airport Spotlights Long-standing Concerns Over Runway Safety March 30, 2026 On the night of March 22, 2026, a Jazz Aviation regional jet landing at LaGuardia Airport (LGA) in New York, NY, struck a firefighting vehicle that had received air traffic control clearance to cross the active runway. The collision killed both pilots and injured a flight attendant, several passengers, and two firefighters. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is leading an investigation ofthe crash, assisted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (representing the country of aircraft registry), the airline, the airplane manufacturer, and others. FAA and the aviation industry have been long concerned over safety risks associated with airport surface operations, including the movements of aircraft and ground vehicles. The deadliest crash in civil aviation history occurred on March 27, 1977, in Tenerife, Spain, when two jumbo jets collided resulting in 583 fatalities. A notable runway disaster in the United States occurred on February 1, 1991-35 people were killed when a USAir Boeing 737 landing at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) collided with a SkyWest regional turboprop instructed to line up on the same runway. These crashes prompted a continuing focus on monitoring and mitigating operational risks in the airport environment. FAA closely tracks runway incursions (events involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle, or person on an airport runway). Runway incursions pose significant collision risks, and the high speeds of aircraft takeoffs and landings increase the potential for significant aircraft damage and serious or fatal injuries. Runway incursions result from human errors including incorrect air traffic control clearances, aircraft landings or takeoffs without clearances, or aircraft or ground vehicles entering or crossing runways without clearances. These events are precipitated by various underlying factors including degraded situational awareness, high workload, unfamiliar settings or procedures, reduced visibility, and communications errors. FAA investigates runway incursions and classifies them based on their severity and the source of the error. Since 2022, the total number of runway incursions in the United States has remained relatively consistent at around 1,700 annually. It was reported that over the past five years, collisions were narrowly avoided 26 times and on 52 other occasions, the event posed a significant collision potential. Given that there are more than 20 million commercial flights per year, serious runway incursions are low-probability events, but they pose significant collision dangers. LGA is one of five high-density traffic airports in the United States where the number of hourly operations have specific caps set in regulation. Most U.S. airports do not have regulatory caps on the Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov IN12675 CRS INSIGHT Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress