Days after the disaster on a LaGuardia runway, two veterans of a specialized rescue unit have been released from the hospital.

Emergency vehicles are parked near an overturned fire truck.
An Air Canada Express jet slammed into a Port Authority truck late Sunday at LaGuardia Airport. The two pilots were killed but the firefighters survived.

It immediately became the enduring image of the disaster at LaGuardia Airport: an Air Canada regional jet abandoned on the edge of the runway, tilted upward, its nose sheared off.

But on a patch of grass near the asphalt, almost as a footnote, the mangled remains of a boxy safety yellow rescue vehicle lay on its side.

Amazingly, its cab remained intact. The two rescue officers operating the vehicle — Sgt. Michael Orsillo and Officer Adrian Baez, both Port Authority Police Department veterans — survived being hit squarely by a commercial jet going nearly 100 m.p.h.

“The plane appeared to hit the truck broadside, and we believe that the officers would not have survived if the plane hit the cab directly,” said Bobby Egbert, a spokesman for the Port Authority Police Benevolent Association, the officers union.

 

Sergeant Orsillo and Officer Baez were hospitalized early Monday morning, both in stable condition. Officer Baez was released later that day. Sergeant Orsillo was released from the hospital on Thursday. He was to be moved to a rehabilitation facility, a person familiar with the situation said.

Neither officer has made a statement since the crash. The Port Authority would not comment for this article or provide information on the two firefighters, and nor would the firefighters’ unions.

Attempts to reach the firefighters by phone and at their homes were unsuccessful.

The two firefighters are trained as Port Authority police officers and work in the Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting, or ARFF, unit, which handles emergency calls around the clock, on and around the airport’s runways. The Port Authority also has ARFF units at Kennedy and Newark Liberty airports, making it one of the largest airport rescue forces in the world.

The Port Authority firefighting position is a desirable one within its police department, and is limited to officers with at least five years on the job. Unlike most municipal public safety officers, firefighters with the Port Authority are also certified as police officers.

According to Port Authority payroll records, both Sergeant Orsillo and Officer Baez were hired as police officers in 2008.

Sources: Satellite imagery via Mapbox; plane position from Flightradar24.

The New York Times

Unlike conventional firefighters, who respond primarily to structural fires, the airport crews handle specialized emergencies. The daily grind entails calls for minor incidents like cockpit light failures. Other runs have the potential for major incidents, like being on-hand for incoming planes leaking hydraulic fluid or with possibly faulty landing gear, Mr. Egbert, the union official, said.

Even on routine calls, the unit often rolls deep, with a convoy of emergency vehicles. The rescue officers turn out in their bunker gear, breathing apparatuses on hand.

The LaGuardia unit is housed in Police Building 137 on the western edge of the airport, along Bowery Bay. On Sunday night, the unit received a call about a strange odor on a United Airlines flight that had sickened crew members. Sergeant Orsillo and Officer Baez hopped into a “crash truck,” one of the unit’s distinctive neon fire rigs, and led a half-dozen supporting vehicles through the drizzle toward the United flight on a taxiway.

Sergeant Orsillo was driving Truck 1, an Oshkosh Striker acquired by the Port Authority in 2017.

The largest of these rigs are bigger than traditional fire trucks, each weighing about 90,000 pounds. They are equipped with specialized firefighting foam and dry chemical agents to extinguish flammable liquid fuel and gas fires along with electrical fires, and are fitted with infrared cameras. Their cabs, with a futuristic-looking wraparound windshield, provide a wide field of vision.

“They look like they should be in, like, ‘Armageddon,’” said Deputy Chief Thomas Wieczerak with Newark Airport’s fire and rescue unit, in a recent video interview.

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A yellow neon truck is parked on a road at an airport.
The trucks used by the Port Authority are larger and heavier than conventional fire trucks and have special equipment.Credit…Dave Sanders for The New York Times

“These are big trucks” Mr. Egbert said. “But they’re no match for a landing aircraft.”

Sergeant Orsillo and Officer Baez had just received permission from the air traffic control tower to cross Runway 4, but seconds later, the controller radioed back frantically and told them to stop. But Truck 1 proceeded to cross the runway just as Flight 8646 touched down though the emergency vehicles behind it stayed in place. It remains unclear whether the firefighters heard the controller’s instruction to stop before the collision.

Kathryn Garcia, the Port Authority’s executive director, said in an interview that the firefighters behind Truck 1 may have had the closest direct view of the full crash.

“They clearly witnessed it before anyone else did and were coming to the assistance of the two officers in the fire truck as well as all of the passengers who were evacuating,” she said.

Nearly a week later, National Transportation Safety Board investigators have made no determination about what might have caused the crash. Were radio communications broken up? Was air traffic control distracted by the United Airlines situation?

The authorities are investigating what part the rescue unit might have played in the collision. Why was Truck 1 lacking a transponder, the vehicle tracking technology that would allow air traffic controllers to precisely monitor its position? Did the runway’s warning lights, which indicate an incoming plane, fail? Or were they not followed?

Whatever the case, veterans of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s firefighting unit, and experts in the field, called the crash a painful example of the danger of operating emergency vehicles in an obstacle course involving speeding commercial jets.

“It’s dangerous work; it’s intense work,” Mr. Egbert said. “Just operating those trucks is difficult.”

It is unclear if the crash could have been avoided if Truck 1 had been equipped with a transponder — standard technology at many major U.S. airports, including Minneapolis-St. Paul International, but not for LaGuardia’s emergency vehicles.

Last year, the F.A.A. recommended, but did not require, that the airport’s vehicles be equipped with the devices.

Speaking on CNN on Wednesday, Jennifer L. Homendy chairwoman of the N.T.S.B., said she believed it was important for such vehicles to have transponders.

“If you’re an air traffic controller, you should be able to see everything that’s on the ground, everything that’s in the immediate airspace so you can ensure safety,” she said.

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A woman stands in front of a billboard.
The head of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer L. Homendy, said that they were investigating a series of potential failures.Credit…Dave Sanders for The New York Times

The crash did not just affect the two members in Truck 1, said Rabbi Mendy Carlebach, a longtime chaplain for the Port Authority who brought coffee and snacks to the ARFF unit members the day after the crash and listened to their stories of that night.

“Thank God these things don’t happen often,” he said. “Such an extreme accident, being hit head-on like that — T-boned — just, it’s a miracle, it’s truly a miracle that they’re OK.”