Antoine Forest had been flying since he was sixteen years old.
He worked his way up through bush planes in Quebec, then a regional carrier, before joining Jazz Aviation in 2022. By March 2026, he was thirty and a captain, based out of Montreal.
On the night of March 22, he was in command of Air Canada Express Flight 8646, a regional jet flying from Montreal to LaGuardia Airport in New York. Beside him sat First Officer Mackenzie Gunther, 24, who had graduated from a Canadian aviation program in 2023 and gone straight into flying for Jazz.
The flight carried 76 people. Seventy-two were passengers. Four were crew.
Just before midnight, the jet lined up to land on Runway 4. At the same moment, a Port Authority fire truck responding to a separate emergency on the airfield was cleared onto that same runway.
Air traffic control tried to call the truck off. It did not clear in time.
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Forest and Gunther were still on the controls as the jet touched down. Passengers said they felt the aircraft brake hard in the instant before it struck the truck. The impact hit the front of the plane directly.
The cockpit absorbed the collision. The cabin behind it did not take the same force.
Both pilots died at the scene. Every other person on that flight survived. Dozens were hospitalized, along with two firefighters from the truck, and most were released within a day.
Passengers who spoke to reporters afterward said the same thing in different words. They believed the pilots' actions in that final stretch of runway were the reason they were alive to say it.
LaGuardia shut down both runways for more than fourteen hours while investigators worked the wreckage. Hundreds of flights were canceled. The National Transportation Safety Board opened an investigation into how the truck and the jet were cleared onto the same runway at the same time.
Forest was from a small town outside Montreal, where he had told relatives as a teenager that flying was the only thing he ever wanted to do. Gunther had been flying professionally for less than three years.
Neither man lived long enough to hear what the passengers said about him.
What is left is the sequence itself. A jet on final approach. A truck where it should not have been. Two men whose hands stayed on the controls through the only part of that landing that mattered.
Seventy-two passengers walked off that runway. The two men flying the plane did not.
If your hands were the only thing left standing between the people behind you and the worst outcome, would you have kept them on the controls until the end?