Hundreds of pilots commemorate Quebec colleague killed in New York crash

Hundreds of uniformed pilots gathered in Coteau-du-Lac on Friday to honour the life of an Air Canada Jazz pilot who died in a crash at New York’s LaGuardia airport last month.

Antoine Forest, from Coteau-du-Lac, was the 30-year-old captain of a flight from Montreal that collided with a firetruck on the runway at the New York airport after an apparent miscommunication with an air-traffic controller led the truck to continue into the path of the landing plane.

“He was a well-trained, good, experienced pilot. It’s unfortunate,” said Louis-Philippe Desmarais, the president of the union representing pilots at Air Inuit, which is affiliated with the Airline Pilots Association, who attended a visitation for Forest on Friday afternoon.

He said pilots are a “very close community, we stick together.”

A tragedy on a routine flight, like the one that killed the young Quebec pilot, hits close to home, Desmarais said. “When something like that happens, it makes us think about all the things we do repetitively, routinely.”

He said pilots think about accidents being caused by errors, or mechanical problems.

“In this case, it was something that we don’t think about,” Desmarais said. “Now, definitely, we’re going to work on that and make sure that it doesn’t happen again from our side.”

People gather for a visitation in Coteau-du-Lac for Antoine Forest, one of the pilots killed in an Air Canada Express crash at New Yorks LaGuardia airport on March 22, at J.A. Larin et Fils funeral home in Montreal on Friday, April 17, 2026. Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette

In Forest’s hometown Friday, mourning pilots joined flight attendants in uniform and community members dressed in black. Outside the funeral home, visitors cried and hugged each other after paying tribute to Forest.

The crash, shortly before midnight on March 22, killed Forest and his co-pilot, Mackenzie Gunther, and sent more than 40 people to hospital, though most were released within hours.

There were 72 passengers and four crew members on board at the time of the collision.

Forest began flying at a young age. At 16, he was piloting bush planes seasonally for Air Saguenay before moving to twin-engine aircraft, according to family members.

He trained at the Centre québécois de formation aéronautique and went on to work for Air Saguenay and ExactAir before joining Jazz Aviation in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In 2021 and 2022, Forest also worked as an aerial detection pilot with the Société de protection des forêts contre le feu (SOPFEU) helping monitor wildfires across Quebec.

A private funeral ceremony will be held at a later date, according to the funeral home where the visitation took place.

He is survived by his father, Mario Forest, his mother, Manon Turpin, his partner, Kahina Gagnon, and his brother, Cédric.

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