Less pedantically, I thought it was interesting that the call to close the airport came directly from "Car 100" aka the ground crew. No stopping to report the incident to superiors or waiting for confirmation about what to do. The guy on the scene just says "OK, airport's closed now" and ATC immediately makes it happen.

That's pretty impressive in its own right, from an organizational point of view.

1) There may be additional communications we don't hear; all we're getting is what the tower hears, which is not necessarily everything.

2) Aviation is, in large part by necessity, built around the concept of knowing who has authority to do what, and listening when the person with the authority gives an instruction. When the tower hears "airport is closed" from someone with the authority to say it, then the airport is closed, full stop. Arguing about "well, why is it closed" or "I'll close it when I check with my supervisor" eats time that can cost lives, so organizationally it's set up to avoid having that happen.

It has the feel of procedures adopted after a "lesson learned." Guy at the scene knows what's going on, take action on that and save lives and seconds. Let's make that policy.

If they had to go up and down a chain of authority, that following flight 1999 would have landed into the emergency.

I thought the same exact thing. I wonder if maybe it's a trick of the audio (someone else actually came on the line), or if that was actually what happened. It was pretty surreal if so, just like you said.

It sounds similar to manufacturing's authorisation for anybody to stop the line in the case of defects - its better to delay things for a short while and make sure everything is ok than it is to compound the problem by letting things continue. I imagine in the case of an airport with a plane stuck on the active runway this is even more the case, since the problem can quickly escalate into hundreds of people dying.

My glider club just had our annual safety meeting, and one of the things we repeat every year is that it doesn't matter how new or inexperienced you are, if you see something that looks unsafe, call it out or put a stop to things if you think it's necessary. Doesn't matter if it's your first day at the airport, speak up.

I imagine the same thing would be true here. If you think the airport needs to be closed, then close the airport. Doesn't matter if you just got hired five minutes ago for the lowest position in the whole place, if you think the airport is no longer safe then shut it down.

Car 100 could very well have been a Port Authority of NY/NJ officer. They likely do have the authority to enact a temporary closure of an airport under their jurisdiction.

I think saying that ATC's close the airport is accurate, in the sense that they're doing the work of rerouting all the planes away and so on.