A federal investigator racing to examine the scene of a deadly New York air crash was delayed for three hours in a TSA security line in Texas, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said on Monday.
The NTSB is investigating after a freak collision late Sunday night between an Air Canada plane and a Port Authority fire truck at New York’s LaGuardia Airport in which two pilots were killed.
Dozens more were injured in the crash, which happened while a Port Authority Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting vehicle was responding to a separate incident across the airport.
LaGuardia remained closed after the crash and was not expected to reopen until Tuesday afternoon.
The NTSB sent out investigators to LaGuardia on Monday. But Jennifer Homendy, the NTSB chair, said at a press conference that long airport security lines caused one of the investigators to be delayed for three hours.
“We have DHS that is shut down, and we have long TSA lines,” she said. “Our air traffic control specialist, who was in line with TSA for three hours, until we called—in Houston—to beg, to see if we can get her through, so we can get her here. So it’s been a really big challenge to get the entire team here, and they’re still arriving as we speak.”
Team members began arriving at around 3 a.m. on Monday and would continue arriving until about 1 a.m. Tuesday, she said. The team had not yet had a full day of investigation and was therefore unable to provide much additional detail on the crash that killed two Air Canada pilots, Homendy added.
“What I’m going to tell you is we are world-renowned investigators,” Homendy said. “But we deal in facts, and if we are not able to verify those yet—and we haven’t been able to—we can’t provide those.”
It comes amid a partial government shutdown, which has forced 50,000 TSA officers to work without pay. It marks the third time in under a year that a government shutdown has left TSA employees without pay, with Senate Democrats and Republicans at an impasse over DHS funding.
With no agreement to end the shutdown in place, around 300 TSA officers have quit, while the number of TSA officers calling in sick is rising, Acting Deputy TSA Administrator Adam Stahl told CBS Mornings.
The staff shortages have caused chaos at airports, with huge queues and hours-long wait times at security checkpoints. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were deployed to 14 airports in cities including New York, Atlanta, and Houston this week to “help support” staff in “non-specialised security functions”, Stahl told Fox News.
Meanwhile, Stahl told CBS last week that airports may have to be shut down if the chaos continues.
“If the call rate does climb, there could be scenarios where we may have to shut down airports,” he said. “This is a serious situation.”
CNN aviation and transportation correspondent Pete Muntean said on Monday that the incident at LaGuardia Airport was “kind of symptomatic of an aviation system that’s really bursting at the seams.”
