Jazz Aviation

Is Jazz Aviation safe?

Jazz is a safe airline with one fatal accident in its history, and that accident appears to have been caused largely outside the aircraft. We score it 76, below Air Canada at 84 and close to American Airlines. Most passengers never see the Jazz name: it flies the Air Canada Express routes, sold with AC flight numbers, between Canadian cities and to the US.

Jazz was formed in 2001 from Air Canada's regional airlines and is now owned by Chorus Aviation. It flies under its own Transport Canada certificate, with its own pilots and maintenance, under a contract with Air Canada that runs to 2035. Because of that, we score it separately and do not count its accidents against Air Canada, just as we treat Envoy or SkyWest separately from American and United.

The LaGuardia collision

On 22 March 2026, Jazz flight 646 from Montreal, a CRJ-900 sold as Air Canada 8646, was landing on runway 4 at LaGuardia at 23:37 with 72 passengers and four crew. A convoy of airport fire vehicles was heading across the airfield to a United jet that had reported a smell in its cabin.

According to the NTSB's preliminary report, the tower cleared the jet to land about two minutes before touchdown. The convoy's first radio call was blocked by another transmission. When the controller did clear "Truck 1 and company" across runway 4, the jet was a little over 100 feet above the ground, 12 seconds from touchdown. The truck started moving while the red runway entrance lights were still on. The controller then called "stop, stop, stop", but the firefighters did not realise it was meant for them. The truck had no transponder, so the tower's surface radar did not raise an alarm.

The aircraft hit the truck at about 104 mph. The captain and first officer were killed. Of the 76 people on board and two firefighters, 39 went to hospital and six were seriously injured. It was the first fatal crash at LaGuardia in 34 years.

The investigation is open and no probable cause has been set. The preliminary findings published so far focus on the clearance, the truck and the warning systems, not on the Jazz crew. For our score it still counts: a fatal accident in the last 15 years puts the accident record in the 60 to 79 band of our rubric. We put it at 74, near the top of that band, because the cause appears to lie largely with the clearance and the airport's warning systems.

Jazz's record before 2026

Before LaGuardia, Jazz had flown for 25 years without a fatal accident, with many thousands of short flights a year in some of Canada's worst weather. Two aircraft were written offHull lossAn accident in which an aircraft is destroyed or damaged beyond economic repair. People may or may not be hurt.More in the glossary, neither with deaths:

• 20 May 2007, Toronto: a CRJ100 landed in a gusting crosswind of 13 to 23 knots, bounced and came down hard. Both main gear fittings failed, and the aircraft slid on its struts. Nobody was hurt.
• 10 May 2019, Toronto: a Dash 8-300 returning from Sudbury in bad weather collided with a fuel truck while taxiing to the gate at 1:25 a.m. The aircraft spun, and five people were injured. The TSB found that the tanker driver's view to the right was blocked by the truck's own equipment.

The event that worries us more is from November 2017. A Dash 8-400 landing at Toronto's Billy Bishop airport in gusty wind bounced and came down at more than 5.5 g, a force strong enough to stop both flight recorders. After a visual check by the crew, the aircraft flew back to Montreal. Only there did mechanics find damage to the rear fuselage and the right main gear. The TSB ran a limited investigation and did not publish a cause.

What does Jazz fly?

At the end of June 2026, Jazz flew 32 Dash 8-400 turboprops, 30 CRJ-900s and 25 Embraer E175s for Air Canada, according to Chorus Aviation's quarterly report. Seven older CRJ200s were parked. The Dash 8-400 and CRJ-900 are proven Canadian designs, but neither is fly-by-wireFly-by-wireA flight control system in which the pilot's inputs go to computers, which then move the control surfaces. Many such systems also stop unsafe manoeuvres.More in the glossary, and the fleet is getting smaller as aircraft leave the Air Canada contract. Jazz does not publish an average fleet age, so our fleet score is cautious.

Flying Air Canada Express

• Check "operated by" on the booking. Air Canada Express flights are run by Jazz or by PAL Airlines. Both are Canadian regional airlines under Transport Canada.
• Expect turboprops on short routes. Routes from Billy Bishop and many routes in eastern and western Canada use the Dash 8-400. It is slower and feels bumpier than a jet, which is a comfort matter, not a safety one.
• Winter brings cancellations. Small airports with limited approach aids close more often in snow and fog than Toronto or Montreal. A cancelled flight is better than a forced landing.

How we scored it

The LaGuardia accident sets the accident record at 74, and Transport Canada oversight scores 85, a little below Air Canada because we could not confirm Jazz's current IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary entry. The fleet (68), the 2017 and 2019 incidents (76) and a network of tight and small airports (76) complete a score of 76.