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The crash occurrence was a shocking runway accident at the LaGuardia Airport in New York, where two Air Canada Express pilots died late in the night on Sunday, March 23, 2026. The crew is known to have been Captain Antoine Forest of Coteau-du-Lac, Quebec, and First Officer MacKenzie Gunther.

The Bombardier CRM-900, Flight 8646, flown by Jazz Aviation, was heading to the Port Authority Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting truck on Runway 4 at around 11:40 pm, and it had 72 passengers and four crew on board. The fire truck was heading to a different place where one of the planes was on fire.

The impact caused the destruction of the front part of the jet, and two pilots immediately died. This caused forty-one individuals, consisting of passengers and two firefighters, to get admitted to the hospital, but a lot of them have since been discharged. There were emergency calls of “Stop truck 1 using air traffic control audio. Stop! Just before the collision.

Disruption was very severe due to the closure of LaGuardia Airport that took several hours. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada and the NTSB have initiated a collaborative probe; both the black boxes were retrieved. This is the first fatal accident in the LaGuardia affair in approximately thirty years.