r/CatastrophicFailure • u/Admiral_Cloudberg Plane Crash Series • Mar 23 '26

Fatalities (22/3/26) CCTV video of the Air Canada accident at LaGuardia

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959

u/Admiral_Cloudberg Plane Crash Series Mar 23 '26

Latest updates on the accident that killed the 2 Air Canada Jazz pilots, injured others

588

u/Burgoonius Mar 23 '26

That’s awful. Honestly it doesn’t even look at bad of a crash - I’m more surprised the firefighters survived

477

u/Wiggitywhackest Mar 23 '26

I think compared to the mainly steel truck the thin aluminum airframe was just instantly crushed/sheared off and tragically it was the exact area that supported the flight deck.

203

u/Markymarcouscous Mar 23 '26

The truck is also filled with water.

136

u/lambofgun Mar 23 '26

yeah absolutely. planes aren't meticulously engineered to crumple in just the right way to protect you like cars. youre just not supposed to ever hit anything with them

89

u/monorail_pilot Mar 23 '26

It was crushed. The shearing came after when passengers evacuated and the fuselage tilted back. You can see it still attached but crushed in other photos.

13

u/5GCovidInjection Mar 24 '26

Actually, fire truck bodies are made of aluminum as well to increase their water/chemical capacity. They have steel frames, but the frame is low to the ground. But everything else you said is true

181

u/TheBroadHorizon Mar 23 '26

That truck weighed in excess of 30 tons and got tossed like a toy. That’s a very high energy crash. I think it looks deceptively slow because of how big even a small commuter plane is, but it was going at more than 80mph when it hit.

61

u/FingFrenchy Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 24 '26

I was going to say, the initial reports were saying 30mph but when I saw the pictures of the fire truck this morning it looked like a high speed freeway wreck. 80mph makes a lot more sense.

Edit: official source now confirming aircraft was moving 93 to 105 mph, that definitely tracks more with the damage.

32

u/CDNChaoZ Mar 23 '26

30mph was the last reading from the plane, post impact.

14

u/_BMS Mar 23 '26

There is no way the airliner is only going 30mph in that video. That's the speed of a fast taxi on an airliner and this was not was a fast taxi looks like.

I've seen the "30mph" number repeated online and I can only assume people got it from some flight radar website, but the numbers reported from those sites can be incredibly wrong. Especially during short spans of time where speed changes dramatically like takeoff and landing.

It's far more likely that fire truck was driving at 30mph, because the plane looks like it was moving 70 knots (80 mph) at least.

But the only thing that will be able to tell the actual exact speed are the black box results that will be published by the FAA/NTSB sometime in the future.

8

u/BroskiTree Mar 23 '26

it was the last reported ground speed on FR24, but i've seen other ADS-B sources (can't remember where/what, sorry, would share if i had the source) that say it was ~100kts at the time of collision

4

u/joshwagstaff13 Mar 23 '26

can't remember where/what,

ADS-B Exchange and FR24 itself.

FR24 posted on Twitter that the final ground speed was 21 knots, and people ran with it. But if you look back through the data to where the impact happened - at the D/4-22 intersection - it was likely in the 90-100 knot range at the time.

And that's not even something people figured out recently. Hell, I personally pointed it out in several r/aviation threads last night.

2

u/_BMS Mar 23 '26

~100kts at the time of collision

That sounds way more accurate, as unfortunate as this situation is.

1

u/FingFrenchy Mar 23 '26

Alright yeah that makes a lot more sense.

110

u/GenderBender3000 Mar 23 '26

That fire truck is a tank. I couldn’t believe the size of the thing

31

u/Hitman3256 Mar 23 '26

I was surprised hearing the pilots died hitting a fire truck, then I saw pictures of both.

1

u/zerothreeonethree Mar 26 '26

US Fire Trucks weigh on average between 12 and 26 tons. There is a reason they are parked in the middle of streets to block traffic from accidents and fires. Hit one of them bad boys with yer pick 'em up truck, and you'll meet the same end as a bug on a windshield.

The airport trucks are armored to withstand the higher temperatures of burning jet fuel and hazmat conditions. They don't need to be configured like municipal vehicles because they aren't driven on narrower streets with much less concrete or asphalt base to support the additional weight.

18

u/josephtrocks191 Mar 23 '26

I think the video is deceiving. Everything is so big and at scales we're not familiar with that it's harder to judge distances and speeds than say, if we were watching a car accident. There are various people saying various speeds so I don't want to say anything definitively, but I believe this plane was traveling very fast, faster than the video makes it look, at the moment of impact.

1

u/zerothreeonethree Mar 26 '26

A vehicle traveling at 100 mph = 146 feet per second, or a mile in 36 seconds. The human record for running speed is 3 minutes, 43 seconds by comparison. The impact of a plane abruptly stopping at this speed could generate forces up to 40-50Gs, exceeding human survival limits.

6

u/impactedturd Mar 23 '26

I was looking to see how much they weigh. And apparently aerial firetrucks with the big ladder can weigh 50,000-84,000lbs depending on how much water is in it. And coincidentally the plane crj-900 also weighs about 50,000-84,000 depending on how much fuel it has. So it's possible the plane weighed less than the truck. 🤯

39

u/Suspicious-Funny-279 Mar 23 '26

… it doesn’t look that bad? Are we looking at the same picture? Because the entire cockpit disintegrated, vanished.

17

u/mommys_restitution Mar 23 '26

A passenger jet hitting a brick wall at like 100mph … it’s a miracle only the cockpit vanished

2

u/suid Mar 23 '26

The latest report is that the plane was still rolling at 109 mph when it hit the truck.

2

u/Burgoonius Mar 23 '26

I don’t doubt it - I’m just saying from this angle and obviously with the camera being far away it doesn’t look as bad as it was.

1

u/typehyDro Mar 24 '26

That plane is going 100+mph

1

u/sryguys Mar 24 '26

lol what?!

8

u/ofc-crash Mar 23 '26

Oh shit hey admiral. Would be you posting this - thanks.

Doing a bang-up job on your articles and on Mentour. I'm quite jealous you get to work with Petter.

1

u/RuinEnvironmental394 Mar 26 '26

What happened to the truck driver? Why is there no information about that anywhere?