NEW YORK —
Clément Lelièvre says the pilots of the Air Canada jet that collided with a fire truck on a runway at New York’s LaGuardia Airport likely saved his life and the lives of other passengers late Sunday night.
The pilot and co-pilot of Flight AC8646 were killed in the collision, which sent 41 people to hospital and injured others, like Lelièvre, who were treated at the scene.
“Just as the plane touched down, the pilot braked extremely hard,” Lelièvre, a French national and frequent flyer, told The Canadian Press on Monday.
“I don’t know the circumstances, but I think he kind of saved our lives because he must have had incredible reflexes.”
Disaster struck shortly after 11:30 p.m. Sunday as the plane — operated by Air Canada Express carrier Jazz Aviation — touched down after its journey from Montréal Trudeau International Airport. Of the 41 people transported to two hospitals in Queens, nine were still in care, including some in serious condition, Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, told a news conference early Monday morning.
In the moments before the collision, a firefighting truck was responding to a separate incident on a United Airlines flight that had aborted its takeoff and reported a strange odour on board. Air traffic control recordings suggested the odour on the plane had made some flight attendants feel ill. LaGuardia controllers were also mobilizing a stair truck in case the plane needed to let people off.
One air traffic control could be heard on a radio transmission giving clearance to a vehicle to cross part of the tarmac, then trying to stop it.
“Stop, Truck 1. Stop,” the transmission says. The controller can then be heard frantically diverting incoming aircraft from landing.
In the aftermath of the collision, one staffer sought to console another. “That wasn’t good to watch,” says one.
“I know. I tried to reach out,” says the second person. “We were dealing with an emergency earlier.”
“You did the best you could,” says the first.
Garcia deferred additional questions about the sequence of events leading up to the crash to investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board.
Lelièvre said passengers escaped through emergency exit doors, hopping off the wings to the ground. Everyone helped each other get out, he said. He had injuries to his head and knee that were treated on the tarmac. Lelièvre said he saw passengers bleeding, some with head injuries.
“Well, strangely enough, I wasn’t scared or panicked. On the contrary, I think most of us were pretty aware of what happened. So we all went outside, we got other people out,” Lelièvre said.
“At the time, it was OK, but then around 4 or 5 in the morning, when the adrenalin had worn off a bit, we realized that this doesn’t happen every day.”
Photos from the scene showed the jetliner on the ground, surrounded by red rescue vehicles, in the glare of portable floodlights. It sat on its tail, its crumpled nose pointed toward the sky, the cockpit peeled back all the way back to the side windows, exposing a shredded tangle of wires and flight controls.
Stairways used to evacuate passengers from aircraft were seen pushed up to the emergency exits on the white jet. A heavily damaged neon yellow fire truck was seen nearby, laying on its side.
Two Port Authority employees travelling in the fire truck suffered non-life-threatening injuries, Garcia said.
Christopher Pal, a professor at Polytechnique Montreal, was among the passengers who managed to escape the plane after the crash, his wife Sarah Dorner said in an interview.
“He lost his glasses, he smashed his face into the seat in front of him,” Dorner said, describing his injuries as some bruising around his eyes.
She said her husband called her shortly after the crash and told her how another passenger opened an emergency door near the wing.
“So he was able to climb onto the wing and slide off the wing to get off,” Dorner said. “There was there’s still a drop, so some of the passengers were hesitating because not everyone is in the shape that you would like to just jump off of a wing.”
Dorner said Pal was encouraging them to evacuate at a quicker pace and there was a smell of gas in the air.
“He said he was standing outside saying, ‘come on, I’ll catch you. Just slide down. I’ll catch you. I’m here for you,'” Dorner said. “I could hear it in his voice that it was quite a shocking event, but he was pleased that he was able to to help other people out.”
She added that her husband postponed his scheduled meetings and spent the day resting in New York.
In a statement, Air Canada said it has officials en route to LaGuardia to assist in the investigation, adding, “We are deeply saddened by the loss of two Jazz employees, and our deepest condolences go out to the entire Jazz community and their families.”
Designed to carry 76 to 90 passengers for short- and medium-haul routes, the CRJ-900 is considered a workhorse feeder jet traditionally linking regions to bigger hub airports. The aircraft has a narrow, long fuselage, two-rear mounted turbofan engines and a T-shaped tail — the horizontal stabilizer sits high on the vertical fin.
Early Monday, some passengers who had arrived at LaGuardia hours before their flights hoping to beat security lines during the ongoing government funding lapse straggled out of the airport, rebooked for Tuesday. Others were hastening to other airports, as far as Long Island MacArthur in suburban Ronkonkoma, to try to catch their flights.
Garcia said the airport was to remain closed until at least 2 p.m. Monday to facilitate the investigation, which was being led by the U.S. transportation safety board. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said Monday it was deploying a team of investigators to support the American agency.
On social media, Canadian Transport Minister Steven McKinnon wrote that Canada is working closely with U.S. authorities as they investigate. “Aviation safety remains our highest priority,” he said.
LaGuardia is one of the three major airports serving the New York City region. Located in the borough of Queens, it sits on the edge of Flushing Bay, east of Manhattan, with two main intersecting runways. It is extremely busy given its proximity to Manhattan and handles a heavy load of mostly domestic flights.
LaGuardia was 19th busiest in 2024 out of more than 500 U.S. airports, with over 16.7 million passengers boarding there, according to a 2025 FAA database.
The report by The Canadian Press was first published March 23, 2026.
— With files from Aaron Sousa, Nick Murray, Dean Bennett and The Associated Press
Kelly Geraldine Malone, The Canadian Press
