'The Pilots Sacrificed Themselves' Captain Steeeve on LaGuardia Crash + Max Amini & Afroman

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0:31Stop truck one, stop. Stop truck one, stop. Why do you think the truck would have been cleared to cross? Looks like one agency wasn't talking to another, or they were trying to save a dime. Afro man will bring it to ya.

0:47Piers Morgan:This came down to free speech, right? This whole thing. That's the only power the little man has, but that's the only power the little man needs to get justice. Everything is different in England. Everything. They drive on a different side. Oh, Shakespeare took a shit here. They are so full of themselves. Would you like to take this opportunity to apologise to the people of my country, Maximilian? This whole thing was a set-up, Pierce.

1:20Piers Morgan:The Iran war has rightly dominated our coverage for several weeks now and we'll be returning to the subject a little later in the show. But there are, of course, other issues affecting our audience. Illegal dramas of the rapper Afro Man, for example, who will be joining me shortly. On a much more serious note, chaos at U.S. airports. First a deadly collision at New York's LaGuardia Airport. Now massive security delays and the deployment of ICE agents. Joining me to show a light on what's happening is the former commercial and military pilot Steve Schneibner, known to millions as Captain Steve.

1:50Piers Morgan:Welcome back, Captain Steve. How are you? It appears it's a pleasure to be with you. It's under awful circumstances, however. Yeah, terrible. And sadly, that is why I normally talk to you, because it normally follows something sort of apocalyptic in the air industry. This is a weird one, a very strange thing to have happened. When you first heard about this, for those viewers who haven't seen it, here's a bit of footage of what happened here. Stop truck one. Stop. Stop truck one. Stop.

2:23Piers Morgan:So what you have there is an Air Canada plane just running into a fire truck at LaGuardia, one of the busiest airports in America, obviously. When you first heard about this, could you quite believe this had happened? Well, I was based at LaGuardia for most of my career, so I'm very experienced at that airport. And that airport is one of the top 10 probably most precarious airports on the planet. It's a small real estate footprint there. There's a lot of volume in and out. And then even at 1130 at night, there's a fair amount of traffic going on. And you throw in the weather and the rain, visibility is low.

3:03Think about driving down a dark country road at night. Even though the runway has lights on it, it's not lit like an expressway where you can see the pavement. And so again, the truck is gonna have a hard time seeing the airplane. The airplane's gonna have a hard time seeing the truck until the last minute. then you throw in the issues with a kind of a, seems like an overwhelmed controller. And it's a recipe for disaster. And it's a shame.

3:27Piers Morgan:Have you come close to a similar thing yourself in all your career? Well, I've had to go around. Going around is now, you see it at the last second and something was either still on the runway. Most of the time, another airplane hadn't vacated the runway properly. Never really had a fire truck go on the runway. However, I'll say this, In our simulator training every 12 months, you're in the simulator for two or three days, about 12 hours of simulator training altogether. And eventually they will throw in one of those types of scenarios. You've been cleared to land. You're at about 100 feet off the runway.

4:02And the simulator instructor sitting behind you will just whisper, a truck just drove on the runway. And that's your cue to hit the buttons and go around. I don't think these guys had that much of a heads up. Clearly, I think they were touching down at the point where the truck pulled onto the runway.

4:18Piers Morgan:So let's just go through some of the questions which the National Transport Safety Board are obviously going to be considering. The first one, why do you think the truck would have been cleared to cross? The investigators found that a controller cleared the fire truck to cross runway four just 12 seconds before the plane landed. How could that happen? Well that's clearly the mistake and remember you still got human beings involved in all of this. You can get all the technology you want. There's this air surface detection system that's been on the airports. LaGuardia has one. It's been there for 30 years.

4:51It's supposed to detect things like that and give a little alert into the ear of the controller, letting them know that there's an impending conflict on the runway. That system didn't work because the truck didn't have a transponder installed in it. So it renders the rest of the system inoperative. And then at the end of the day, the controller just missed. He had cleared the Jazz flight, I think, two minutes prior to land. He got distracted, it looks like, by another emergency that was on the airport. That's why the trucks were going from where they were over to the other side of the airport.

5:27And then they're going to ask for clearance to go across runway four. And I think he just lost track of where that airplane was. And he clears them to go on. He realizes it at the last second. And then you hear in the audio. He says, stop, stop, stop. But they're in that big truck. It's a big old diesel truck. They've pushed their foot down on the gas. It's loud in the truck. I'm not even sure they even heard his command to stop.

5:48Piers Morgan:Right. And that command came just nine seconds before impact. The audio reveals the controller shouting, as you said, truck one, stop, stop, stop. But nine seconds is a pretty short period of time, isn't it? To hear that, react to that, especially given all the conditions it's a it's a it's a short period of time and it's the type of vehicle that's moving is a very large heavy vehicle so they're going to push down on the gas and that thing is going to lumber onto the runway now if they hit the gas even harder it's not a sports car it's not going to take off and if they hit the brakes it's going to take them a while to stop and i think that's what you saw you saw this slow moving truck kind of lumbering out on the runway if they hit the brakes or hit the gas they can't move much and that that airplane is coming i think they hit at about 90 to 100 miles an hour.

6:35The first report said 30. It's clearly much faster than that. And again, it's a rain-slicked runway. So the airplane, who was slamming on their brakes at the time, slowed down a little bit, but didn't slow down enough.

6:49Piers Morgan:The transponder, which should have been equipped on the fire truck, apparently, wasn't equipped. That would have allowed the tower's radar system to track its precise location on the runway. Is that just a fundamental bad mistake? Well, it's beyond a mistake. It's the way the system is set up. So they have this system that they've spent all this money on, this ASDX system. It's been there for 30 years. They've updated it several times. But it's dependent on all of the vehicles, including fire trucks, to have a transponder transmitting to the receivers. That airplane did not have one installed.

7:30There are little different factions there in New York and Boston and a lot of different airports. The fire trucks are owned by the local New York Port Authority. And that's a totally separate pot of money, a totally separate command chain than LaGuardia Airport or any of the other things that are at work at LaGuardia. So it looks like one agency wasn't talking to another, or they were trying to save a dime and didn't put transponders into their vehicles. But the system is useless without those transponders. So why in the world weren't they installed? That's a big head-scratcher for me. If it had been installed and was working, presumably this wouldn't have happened.

8:14Well, it would have been the last line of defense. So the last line is that alert that's going to go into the controller's ear that says there's an impending conflict, and maybe the controller would have seen it prior to that nine seconds. Maybe if they'd had 12 seconds or 15 seconds of warning, they could have hit the go-around buttons and avoided and flown over the truck instead of having to land on the runway and smash into the truck.

8:37Piers Morgan:The cockpit voice recording shows that the control of the aircraft was transferred from the first officer to the captain just six seconds before the crash. And people are wondering why that happened. And why did it happen then? Is there anything unusual in your experience about that part of this? Yeah, that's very unusual because usually the control, if the first officer is making the landing, usually the first officer lowers the nose of the airplane, applies the brakes. You roll all the way out to the end of the runway. When you get down to about 30 miles per hour, you hand it over to the captain.

9:11The captain has to steer the airplane with the tiller. So that is a smooth handoff at the end of the runway. The fact that it took place two seconds after a touchdown indicates to me that the captain saw the truck out ahead and took over, commandeered control of the aircraft by slamming on the brakes. One of the really heroic parts about this is that the captain could have veered the airplane to the left or the right to avoid harm for them up in the cockpit. He did not. He kept the airplane straight and the airplane impacted at a 90 degree angle that truck. If he had veered left or right, the wings would have hit the truck, and all that fuel in the wings would have ignited.

9:50As you notice in this accident, there's no fireball at the end, and that's due to the actions of the pilots. The pilots sacrificed themselves to save everybody else behind them.

10:00Piers Morgan:That's amazing. I hadn't factored that in. So a lot of lives would have been saved by an act of total self-sacrifice. Correct. I mean, with that pilot, in making that call, do you think he would have known that he might himself die? Well, I think it's a split-second decision, and whether it was done intentionally or not, they still, through their actions, saved everybody's life in the back of that airplane. As you noticed, there was no explosion at the end. People are saying that there was apparently, according to the Aviation Safety Reporting System administered by the U.S. Space Agency, NASA, a pilot using the airport in the summer wrote, please do something.

10:41Piers Morgan:after air traffic controllers failed to provide appropriate guidance about multiple nearby aircraft in that case. But that certainly shows an issue potentially with just the volume of traffic on the tarmac at LaGuardia. I mean, as you say, you've flown there many times. Do you think there is an issue generally with traffic at LaGuardia? There's always been an issue with traffic at LaGuardia. Now, the pandemic, during the pandemic, all of that was kind of masked, if you will, because half the airplanes were in the air and half the airplanes were on the ground. There just wasn't that much traffic.

11:17Now, since everybody's come back to flying, we're at full capacity and then some. There's still an air traffic controller shortage. You can't create an air traffic controller overnight. You can't create a pilot overnight. And so Congress could fix some of those issues overnight. They could get rid of the mandatory pilot retirement age. They could get rid of the mandatory air traffic controller retirement age. They're forced out at age 56. All they would have to do is bump that up to 65, and they'd get rid of both shortages. They could do that in the next 24 hours, but again, there's a lot of dysfunction over there in Congress.

11:53I think the capacity issue is there's only so much concrete, and there's only so much real estate, and more and more people want to fly. The only real answer to that is larger and larger airplanes. Those little regional jets only hold about 70 people. If you had airplanes that were holding 200 plus, Plus, you could have fewer flights and still get as many people around. But that's a decision that the airlines are going to have to make, and the government might have to help along with that decision process at some point.

12:21Piers Morgan:There were apparently only two controllers in the tower, which apparently is not uncommon. Many might view it as unsafe. What would your response be to that revelation? Well, listening to Jennifer Homendy, she's the chairperson of the NTSB, NTSB, and I'm a big fan of hers. I think she does a great job. She was saying that that standard operating procedure at LaGuardia and a lot of other major airports around the country, they'll go down to two controllers at a certain time of night, usually the midnight shift. It makes sense. There's not that many flights in and out. Now, in this case, he was dealing with an emergency on the other side of the airport.

12:58He still had the traffic coming in. He had the trucks trying to cross, and the cross frequencies, he was working two different frequencies at the same time. It's unclear what the other controller was doing at that time. I'm going to assume the best, but the reason that they went from one controller to two was because in the midnight shift, sometimes the controller would fall asleep. You know, two o 'clock in the morning, there's nobody arriving, nobody leaving. It's hard to stay awake sometimes. So they ended up putting two people in there so that, you know, they can monitor each other. I don't think the second controller was there looking over the local controller's shoulder to see what was going on.

13:35I think clearly if they had been, they would have made the call that that airplane was about to land. But again, the final report or the preliminary report will tell us a bunch more.

13:43Piers Morgan:When we had that crash at Washington last year, there was a big debate about whether DEI had played a factor in what happened. And a general sense that DEI had been a bit of a problem in recruiting air traffic controllers and stuff. What do you feel about that? Is there any merit to that, do you think? I really don't. Here's why. And I understand the emotional side. People get wrapped up in those sort of things. It takes so long to become an air traffic controller and so long to become a commercial pilot. For a commercial pilot, it's 10 years before I got hired at my airline to be a flight engineer.

14:24I was the third wheel in the cockpit. It took nearly 20 years to become a captain. So you're going to filter out anybody that's not up to speed at that point, regardless of their skin color or their gender. Same thing over at air traffic control. The system filters out anybody that's not up to the standard. Now, whether or not they were wasting time on people and trying to fill quarters, I don't know the first thing about any of that. All I know is that the people that do make it to, like a LaGuardia tower, are really professional and really qualified. And my heart breaks for these two guys up there, because I'm sure that they're just distraught over what happened.

14:57Piers Morgan:And could any of the doge cuts that were made have had an impact here? No, I think this goes back decades. If there's any finger-pointing and blame assessing to do, it goes back at least 40 years. This has been a long time. A lot of administrations didn't pay much attention to what was going on in air traffic control and the updating of the system to get it into the 21st century. So there's a lot of blame to spread on this. I don't think it goes back as short as just six months or a year ago. A couple of quick things just to finish on. One is, as this is all going on, of course, you've got this huge problem with the TSA agents, many of them not going into work, and the ICE agents now being brought in to replace them, enormous lines now at airports up and down the country.

15:46Piers Morgan:How bad are you hearing things actually are, and how important is it for safety, never mind anything else, that this gets resolved quickly? Well, I've heard the same reports you have, and I've been in the airport at least three or four times in the last 10 days. And the lines were a little bit longer than normal. I think it depends on what airport you're at and who's calling in sick. I can't blame these people. You know, this is what the second or third time this year that they've had to go. They've been asked to go without a paycheck. They have bills to pay like the rest of us. They live from paycheck to paycheck.

16:18The problem firmly rests on Congress. Congress is the answer to a lot of these things, and everybody in Congress has got to get over the dysfunction in that place and do their job. They got elected to go to D.C. and make the life of the American people better, and I don't know what they're after, but, man, it's frustrating. It just is.

16:39Piers Morgan:100%. I mean, it's ridiculous. In a country like America, you're seeing these scenes. It just seems farcical to anyone, doesn't it? Finally, Captain Steve, you were first a military pilot. You served eight years in the US Navy, flying aircraft including the P-3 Orion, the T-44, the T-34 Charlie. You ran up 3 ,500 flight hours from 1983 to 1991. Your primary responsibility was hunting submarines, specifically tracking and monitoring Soviet subs in the Atlantic. You got your wings of gold in January 1985. So you must have been watching what's happening in the Iran war very carefully, because obviously most of it so far has been done from the air.

17:25Piers Morgan:What is your assessment just of the military aspect of this? Well, the military aspect is, it's important. Like, whether we should have gotten in or not is another question for another day. But once you get in, you better do it right. And that's the part of this thing that I think is going correctly, is going right. If you're going to do it, don't do half measures. If you're going to try to take over either its regime change or get the country to change their ways, whatever it is, don't do it halfway because there's lives at stake. And the more hand wringing you have over this whole thing, the more lives you're going to lose.

18:05If you're going to do it, do it decisively. And I think the tone in that regard has been spot on. We're going to do this thing. We're going to do it right. And we're going to do it overwhelmingly. That's the military aspect of it. And once you gain air superiority, you can basically do whatever you want because now the other country is basically impotent to fight back or to stop you from what you want to do next.

18:25Piers Morgan:I mean, I get all my knowledge about American military aircraft and their maneuvers from Top Gun movies, probably. How realistic are they compared to what is likely happening over the skies of Iran right now? Well, it appears it's a movie. That's all I'm going to say about that. You know, it's made for entertainment. It's got a whole different focus on it. I love the Top Gun movies. I don't think they're very realistic, but I do, like you, really enjoy the flying scenes in those. I think the reality on the ground is it's a very, very complicated business to wage war with the precision that we've done up to this point.

19:04It's amazing. If you look back at Vietnam to today, the amount of precision that we're doing this in, and the fact that there's only maybe a dozen or so fatalities on the U.S. side. All those are awful. But compared to the Vietnam era, it's just absolutely unbelievable how we do it these days. And hats off to the military members because they do a fantastic job.

19:26Piers Morgan:I've always had you down more of a nice man in the skies than a maverick. Am I right? Yeah, I'm a nice captain. No, not nice. The Iceman from Top Gun. Oh, Iceman. Oh, Iceman. Yeah, no, I'll take that. Rather than Tom Cruise's character Maverick, you're Val Kilmer's Iceman, I think. Yeah, I'm the guy that comes along and keeps Maverick straight. Yeah, I'll take that role. If they want to give it to me, I'll sign the contract right now. Just on a serious point about the sort of movie analogy, I've been a bit uncomfortable, I have to say, with the White House putting out these memes and stuff where they evoke imagery from movies and sort of celebrate destroying stuff in Iran.

20:09Piers Morgan:As a military guy yourself, historically, do you have a problem with that? Do you think they should keep it real? Well, I think that it's easy for military and ex-military to get all kind of excited and hyped up about what's going on and the adrenaline is flowing and the testosterone is flowing. I think the practical side of these things is everybody needs to take a big, deep breath, look at what's really going on. This is as serious as it gets, what's going on right now. And everybody go into it sober-minded. And yeah, it bothers everybody if there's any frivolity in this or any silliness on the side.

20:45It ought to be taken very, very seriously. And to the extent that either side of this issue is being silly or not taking it seriously, I'm not a big fan of those things.