New York’s LaGuardia Airport is closed until Monday afternoon after the collision. There were 76 people on board the Air Canada flight, and 41 were injured.

New York’s LaGuardia Airport reopened Monday, some 14 hours after two pilots were killed and dozens of pᴀssengers were injured when an arriving plane collided with a fire truck on a runway.

Air Canada Flight 8646 had just landed with 72 pᴀssengers and four crew members when it struck the Port Authority fire-rescue vehicle responding to a separate issue on another flight around 11:40 p.m. Sunday, officials said.

“It was a disaster the likes of which we’ve not seen here in three decades,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said at a news conference at the airport in Queens shortly after flights resumed at 2 p.m.

Air traffic control audio recordings obtained earlier appeared to show a controller had cleared the fire truck to cross the runway before suddenly telling it to stop.

“I messed up,” one air traffic controller was heard saying on the recording.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at the new conference said he didn’t want to “front-run” the investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, who are leading the probe.

“I can’t give you specifics on what went wrong,” Duffy said.

But when asked about viral rumors that only one air traffic controller was working in the tower at the time of the accident, Duffy insisted, “That’s not accurate.”

Duffy, in an earlier interview with NBC News, said the Federal Aviation Administration was specifically looking into whether air traffic control staffing figures into the incident.

NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said at a news conference on Monday evening that air traffic controller staffing would be a part of the agency’s probe, which was launched before sunrise Monday and could still be staffing up through early Tuesday as a result of travel delays.

The NTSB will also look at air traffic controllers’ communication training and have asked to see an FAA replay of the events via a surveillance system known as Airport Surface Detection Equipment (ASDE), Homendy said. This could help determine if controllers knew in real time where the aircraft and Port Authority vehicle were just before the collision, she said.

“We will be looking at that — where we can see where the aircraft was at certain times and whether the truck was visible on ASDE,” she said.

The chairwoman said investigators will also focus on whether alerts were generated by ASDE before the collision.

Port Authority personnel and emergency responders cut a hole in the roof of the aircraft, dropped into it and retrieved its cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, Homendy said. They’re now in the possession of the NTSB for analysis, she said.

The voice recorder was not damaged and the data recorder will be checked out Tuesday, the chairwoman said.

At least one controller who cleared traffic late Monday was removed from duty, she said, with NTSB investigators hoping to interview the person.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is sending a team to LaGuardia that includes technical advisors, Homendy said. It will be a part of the NTSB’s investigative group ᴀssigned to the collision, she said.

The chairwoman emphasized the board’s independence from the FAA, which employs air traffic controllers but will also participate in the probe. And she said the investigation will be thorough.

“We don’t speculate,” Homendy said. “We don’t take one person at their word.”

Duffy also warned that while LaGuardia has reopened “we are going to be running at very reduced capacity for some time.”

Forty one of the people who were aboard the plane were treated for injuries, some of them serious injuries, at local hospitals, Port Authority Executive Director Kathryn Garcia said at a news conference earlier Monday. So far, 32 have been released from hospitals.

The Port Authority identified the occupants of the fire truck as Sergeant Michael Orsillo and Officer Adrian Baez.

Garcia said the officers’ injuries were not life-threatening.

The plane, a Jazz Aviation flight operating on behalf of Air Canada, was completing its landing and going about 30 mph when it struck the truck, officials said.

The truck was responding to an odor report on a United flight elsewhere at the airport, Garcia said.

In the air traffic controller audio recording, the controller said the flight attendants on the United flight were feeling ill due to the odor. In another recording, a controller is heard requesting permission to cross the runway.

Moments later, a controller was heard repeatedly telling “Truck 1” to stop.

A video posted on social media shows a pᴀssenger jet on the runway with its cockpit high and the underside of its forward fuselage mangled.

The collision at LaGuardia’s runway four is the latest to blow to the beleaguered aviation industry, which has been grappling for years with a chronic shortage of air traffic controllers — and are now contending with a severe shortage of Transportation Security Administration workers due to the partial government shutdown.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani praised the pᴀssengers aboard the plane who “kept one another calm” amid the chaos and released a phone number set up by Air Canada that people can call for information about their loved ones.

That number is 800-961-7099.

There were also transportation woes Monday at another area airport, Newark Liberty International Airport across the Hudson River in New Jersey. A brief ground stop was ordered there after a control tower was evacuated when smoke was detected in an elevator.