Shocking close-up photos show the horribly mangled front of the Air Canada flight that collided with a fire truck in Sunday’s deadly LaGuardia Airport crash — revealing the plane’s entire front and cockpit were torn off.
Photos obtained exclusively by The Post showed the twisted wreckage of Air Canada Express Flight 8646, which was carrying 72 passengers and four crew members from Montreal when it collided with a Port Authority fire truck at the Queens airport around 11:40 p.m.
Images – taken when the damaged CRJ-900 was moved into a hangar to collect passengers’ personal belongings on Wednesday – showed that the cockpit, where the two pilots were flying the plane when it collided with a truck on Runway 4, had completely exploded.
Both pilots – Antoine Forrest and Mackenzie Gunther – died on impact.
Nearly 40 people were injured, including a flight attendant who miraculously survived a 300-foot fall, but everything will be fine thanks to the heroic pilots. Two Port Authority officers who were inside the fire engine also miraculously survived without life-threatening injuries.
The new images provide the clearest and closest picture yet of the massive level of damage the plane suffered in the deadly accident.
The taxiway and torn wires leak from the headless plane, while the cockpit has been completely obliterated, and the front rows are bathed in images. The damage continues to the bottom of the plane, where there are no wheels and front landing gear.
The wreckage of the plane remained visible on the runway on Tuesday for terrified passengers to watch as investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) searched the wreckage.
An audio recording posted online revealed that the tower crew realized too late that the truck and plane were about to collide after both had evacuated from the same runway.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” The controller pleaded to the truck over the radio. “Truck No. 1, stop, stop, stop! Stop, Truck No. 1! Stop!”
The controller can later be heard in the audio admitting “I messed up.”
Two employees in the control tower were performing multiple roles at the time, which was standard procedure at LaGuardia for the midnight shift they were working, NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy told reporters at a news conference Tuesday.
But someone allowed an emergency vehicle to cross the runway to respond to an incident on another plane while the Air Canada plane was landing, Homendy revealed.
Latest coverage of the fatal Air Canada plane crash at LaGuardia Airport
“We know the comptroller was on duty for several minutes after that. Ordinarily, he would be excused,” she said.
Homendy said Tuesday on Fox & Friends that it was “premature” to place blame alone on the air traffic controller heard on the audio recording, and that the agency was investigating “multiple failures.”