How the deadly collision at LaGuardia unfolded | CNN

The Air Canada regional jet was scheduled to take off Sunday from Montreal Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport around 8 p.m. At its helm for the one-hour flight were pilot Antoine Forest and first officer Mackenzie Gunther, both “young men,” the top US Federal Aviation Administration official would say, “at the start of their careers.” They were bound for the third-busiest airport in the New York region, LaGuardia, where the crew of air traffic controllers was slightly smaller than its target of 37, with 33 employed and seven in training, the Transportation Secretary later would explain. Only two controllers were working in LaGuardia’s control tower that night: the local controller, tasked with managing active runways and airspace surrounding the airport, and the controller-in-charge, responsible for overseeing the safety of all air traffic operations and giving pilots departure clearance, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. That staffing was standard operating procedure overnight, the NTSB later would say, at LaGuardia and airports across a country that in recent years had seen a series of high-profile, fatal accidents renew scrutiny of the ai