Tuesday marks thirty days since the March 22 collision of an Air Canada Express regional jet with a Port Authority fire truck on LaGuardia's Runway 4. Two pilots died. The last on-record NTSB finding is Chair Jennifer Homendy's March 23-24 briefings: the fire truck had no transponder, the ASDE-X surface surveillance system did not generate an alert due to the proximity of merging vehicles, and controllers cleared the truck to cross the runway twelve seconds before the Air Canada jet touched down. [1] The paper has tracked four-ruling Pentagon non-enforcement across this same silence window; the LaGuardia dormancy is its sibling artifact.

The loudest public voice on LaGuardia during the dormancy has not been the NTSB. It has been Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation, whose March 27 Washington Post op-ed on "What happened at LaGuardia" was reprinted in the April 14 Reason newsletter. [2] Philadelphia's Jewish Exponent editorial of April 15 called the accident "a warning that the nation's air traffic control system is under strain." [3] The NTSB, for the fourth consecutive week, has filed nothing that updates a fact on the record.

The agency works on a timeline measured in months, not weeks. The March 24 briefing's "multiple failures" framework holds. But thirty days is thirty days, and the public-facing record of the deadliest LaGuardia incident since 2013 is frozen at what Homendy said in week one. The paper counts the silence because the paper promised to.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York