NEW YORK — Two pilots were killed when the jet they were landing at LaGuardia Airport collided with a Port Authority fire truck, authorities said Monday.

The dramatic seconds before and after the crash, which happened at about 11:35 p.m. Sunday and left more than 40 survivors hurt, was captured on audio, with an air traffic controller saying he “messed up” by failing to prevent the collision.

The Queens airport was shut down entirely as the crash was investigated by a raft of agencies. Flights began again shortly after 2 p.m. on Monday afternoon after some 600 flights were canceled.

The Air Canada jet, arriving from Montreal, struck the fire truck, which was crossing the runway as it responded to a foul odor on a different plane.

The plane’s nose was sheared off from the impact, leaving the pilot and co-pilot dead.

Sources told the Daily News that one of the men was found dead on the ground after being ejected from the plane, still strapped into his seat. The other pilot was also found dead at the scene, though it was not immediately clear where.

Quebec’s TVA News identified one of the pilots as 30-year-old Antoine Forest, of Coteau-du-Lac, a city southwest of Montreal. The co-pilot was identified by CBC News as Mackenzie Gunther, who was serving as first officer at the time of the crash.

“These were two young men at the start of their careers,” Bryan Bedford, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, told reporters Monday afternoon. “It’s an absolute tragedy that we’re sitting here with their loss.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul echoed the sentiment.

“Two young pilots left their homes expecting to return to their families, and they will not,” she said. “This is what pains everyone.”

Another crew member, a flight attendant, was found alive strapped into her jumpseat, which had been ejected from the wreckage of the plane.

TVA News identified her as Solange Tremblay, who suffered multiple fractures including a broken leg that required surgery, her daughter Sarah Lépine told the outlet.

“It’s a complete miracle,” Lépine said. “At the moment of impact her seat was ejected more than 100 meters from the plane. They found her and she was still strapped into her seat. She had a guardian angel watching over her. It could have been much worse.”

Other passengers told similar stories of close calls amid the chaos.

“We went down for a regular landing, we came down pretty hard, we immediately hit something, it was chaos from there about five seconds later,” passenger Jack Cabot told ABC 7 New York. “Everyone was hunkered down, everyone was screaming, we didn’t have any directions because the pilots’ cabin was destroyed. So someone said ‘let’s get the emergency exit, let’s get the door and all jump out’ and that’s exactly what we did,” Cabot said.

Passenger Rebecca Liquori, who was on her way back from a baby shower in Montreal, told News12 Long Island that she felt the plane break hard and heard a loud boom after touchdown. “Everybody just jolted out of their seats. People hit their heads. People were bleeding,” Liquori said.

Liquori said she helped open the emergency exit door. Passengers slid down a wing to get out of the mangled aircraft.

In a statement, Air Canada said the passenger manifest listed 72 passengers and four crew members aboard at the time of the crash.

Forty-one people — passengers, crew members and two Port Authority police officers — were taken to area hospitals, with 32 treated for minor injuries and the other nine more seriously hurt, authorities said.

The 32 people with minor injuries have since been released, according to the Port Authority. The two injured officers — who were aboard the fire truck at the time of the crash — were hospitalized in stable condition. One was released late Monday, with the other being held overnight for observation.

The tragic sequence of events started when a United Airlines flight aborted takeoff and declared an emergency, reporting a strange odor aboard, audio from LIVEATC.net, a website that captures air traffic control communications, reveals.

“Weird odor, I don’t exactly know how to describe it,” a crew member aboard the United plane told the tower. “Flight attendants in the back are feeling ill because of the odor.”

The crew of the United flight requested a fire truck respond to their location while they waited for a gate to open up to evacuate the aircraft.

Shortly after that conversation, a fire truck operator can be heard asking an air traffic controller for permission to cross runway No. 4 and getting permission to do so.

Less than four seconds later, however, the controller changed up, telling the truck operator and the pilot of a Frontier Airlines plane, to stop.

“Stop, stop, stop, stop,” the controller yelled. “Truck 1, stop, stop, stop. Stop, Truck 1, stop.”

It was too late.

The controller then ordered a Delta Airlines plane to maneuver around the crash site and assured the Air Canada pilots, their fatal injuries unbeknown to him at the time, to “hold position.”

“Vehicles are responding to you now,” the air traffic controller assures them.

A few moments later, a Frontier pilot lamented what he just saw.

“That wasn’t good to watch,” the pilot said.

“Yeah, I tried to reach out to (inaudible) … And we were dealing with an emergency and I messed up,” the controller replied.

“Nah, maybe you did the best you could,” the Frontier pilot assured him.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement he had been briefed on the crash.

“The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the incident, and the city is in close contact with federal, state and local partners,” Mamdani said. “I am grateful to our first responders, whose swift actions saved lives.”

Investigators at the NTSB lab in D.C. verified Monday that the crashed flight’s cockpit voice recorder was not damaged, according to NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy. The plane’s flight data recorder will be worked on Tuesday, she said.

Runway No. 4 will likely be closed for days as investigators collect and categorize debris from the crash, the NTSB chairwoman said.

Sunday’s fatal incident came 34 years to the day after the last deadly crash at LaGuardia, when USAir Flight 405 to Cleveland made a fiery dive into Flushing Bay after a botched takeoff in snowy conditions on March 22, 1992. Twenty-seven of the 51 people on board were killed.

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(With Josephine Stratman.)

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