I just hope they don't try to pin this on the controller who was on duty and move on without putting plans in place for some sort of structural change. Controllers are forced to work 60+ hour weeks and overnight shifts, and the controller in question was working both ground and air control simultaneously due to staffing shortages. If you listen to the ATC audio, he was handling finding a spot for a plane that aborted takeoff and declared an emergency, while calling emergency services for that plane, while coordinating multiple planes coming in to land, while also coordinating multiple planes trying to take off. With that kind of workload, an accident like this is an eventuality. Even after the fatal accident happened, he had to work for at least another hour before he could get relieved of his duty. Hopefully something will happen to fix this at some point rather than us collectively deciding that an accident or two per year is worth the cost savings of not keeping ATC properly staffed.
The NTSB - and aviation in general - as much as possible tries to avoid "pinning" issues on individuals. The purpose of an investigation isn't to ascribe blame, it's to try to understand what happened and how to prevent it from happening again, and prescribing "don't make mistakes" is not a realistic or useful method for preventing accidents from recurring.
Yes! But every news organization is leading with "I messed up." And the US President commented "They messed up", though it's unclear who that was in reference to.
Humans have a powerful need to affix blame and punish individuals. On the internet, you are forever the worst moment of your life.
We set air traffic controllers up to fail, and then when something goes wrong we torture them until they die, and then torture their memory after they die.
By using the role name rather than proper name, I'd hoped to spare HN from a tangent like this. My point doesn't rest on the nature of single individual, but instead applies to a human tendency. Politicians and press both play to the base impulses of a mass audience, unlike the NTSB. This is not the first time that a politician has scapegoated individuals when systemic failure occurs.
I actually can't remember or imagine another POTUS even getting to a level of specificity required to scapegoat an individual for something like this. The usual (and correct) answer is to say: "We don't know yet what happened, but there will be a full investigation and we will make the changes necessary to prevent it from happening again."
Pretty easy!
It doesn't serve us well to act like this administration is anything other than extremely aberrational.
Look, if you were to review my comment history you would have no doubt about where I stand on the current administration.
But scapegoating any single politician for the systemic problems of aviation is as unhelpful as scapegoating the controller for the crash at Laguardia.
I’ll scapegoat a single politician. Ronald Reagan - he owns 100% of the responsibility for the current state of things when he refused to negotiate better working conditions in 1981. The entire US is still feeling the aftermath.
This is not true. Aviation in the US has problems because of the tendency for safety regulators to do CYA when making decisions instead of adopting new technology.
Leaded gasoline? Illegal to use in the US - unless you're putting it into an old plane, where it's not likely legal to put unleaded in.
ATC? Done with old radar screens and physical cards.
Ground Control? Someone has to be standing in the tower with a pair of binoculars.
The US has an extremely safe aviation system, but the price for that safety has been technological stagnation. If I spend $70k on a small airplane, the best that'll get me is a 1975 Piper with a lawnmower engine and analog gauges. Replacing those with digital instruments will run ~$20k - the instruments themselves are only $7k, but the regulatory burden is quite pricey.
Reagan didn't do the US any favors when he treated ATC as disposable, but the truth is that the volume of flights has increased enormously and the job of ATC has gotten much harder while at the same time controller staffing has been screwed by budget fights in Congress and a couple years of one very misguided DEI policy.
The US needs to automate more of ATC. Human beings should be dedicated to emergencies, not issuing the exact same clearance 300 times a day.
It is absolutely true. I stated that Reagan is the reason that ATC are overworked and underpaid.
You proceeded to list a bunch of things that have absolutely nothing to do with ATC being overworked and underpaid.
"Automating more of ATC" would change absolutely nothing about the fact they're overworked and underpaid, there would just be fewer controllers with the same workload because they lost all ability to collectively bargain with Reagan.
Name an industry that has automated, and the end result was they kept the same number of employees, but paid them more and reduced their hours. Oh, and it can't be a unionized industry. I'll wait patiently wait for that list.
So public sector unions can do no wrong? Can never ask for too much? The public, and by extension, the politicians that they elect, is never allowed to question or refuse their demands?
Your belief is that no other politician in the next half century has had any responsibility for the state of ATC today? No politicians in that time could have increased their pay or increased recruiting and staffing numbers?
I didn’t see anyone scapegoating him for anything other than engaging in direct personal attribution which is counter to aviation safety culture, basic leadership principles, and minimum decorum standards ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agreed. Respect and decorum are gone with the most recent POTUS. It's not okay to ascribe this aviation incident to the ATC controller. However, it is fully okay to call the POTUS and staff out for attacking so many individuals, at such a deeply personal level, over issues that are clearly systematic and that have clearly gotten worse under current leadership.
Sure but most of his predecessors knew enough to not weigh in beyond regret for the tragedy and loss of life until after the investigators did their job.
Indeed. Similar accident (USAir 1493/Skywest 5569) shows that thinking exactly.[1] Was easy to pin on the controller, they went far beyond that in their analysis. Almost always impressed with the professionalism of those organizations. I sometimes wonder how software would look if we had such investigations for major incidents.
I hope it comes down to the NTSB recommending more controllers (or better conditions for controllers) to avoid task saturation, not just more process. It's incredible what a single controller is capable of doing, but for major areas like NYC, it's not enough.
Understand what happened and prevent it from happening again, so long as this can be done without expanding staffing, reducing OT, structural change, etc
No. Safety investigation agencies deliberately aren't regulators. The NTSB may decide that their recommendation is that every air passenger should be carrying a melon, and that results in a press release, a letter to the FAA saying that's what they recommend, that's all.
Deciding to change policies to effect the recommendation isn't their role. That's why you will so often see a safety investigatory body repeatedly recommend the same thing. The UK's RAIB (which is for Rail investigations) for example will often call out why a fatal accident they've investigated wouldn't have happened if the regulator had implemented some prior recommendation, either one they're slow walking or have rejected.
The investigators don't need to care about other factors. Are melons too expensive? Not their problem. Only unfriendly countries grow melons? Not their problem. They only need to care about recommending things that would prevent future harm which is their purpose.
> Deciding to change policies to effect the recommendation isn't their role.
And if it was the role of investigators to change policy, then there would be enormous pressure from industry to reach convenient conclusions, poisoning the investigation process.
Just a quick read/speculation based on the linked forum post...
Short of insane visibility conditions that prevented them from seeing the plane coming, the firetruck operator seems to be the liable party (beyond the airport for understaffing controllers—this seems to be exacerbated by government cuts but that's still no excuse for having a solo controller at that busy of an airport, especially at night).
The controller in question seems to have caught their mistake quickly and reversed the order instead asking the firetruck to stop (but for some reason, this wasn't heard).
Is it common now to have solo operators running control towers?
"Liability" isn't really how we try to see things in aviation. While it's true that it's ultimately considered the responsibility of the truck/plane to visually confirm that crossing the runway is safe, refuse unsafe commands from ATC, and comply to the best of their ability when ATC says "stop" at the last second, we can't stop our analysis there if we want to prevent this from happening in the future, because unless things change someone will make this mistake again in the future. Telling people not to make mistakes isn't going to help at all; it's obvious, and no one wants to cause an accident. The error is just the last step in the process that led to the collision.
I don't think the ATC is at fault here. If they were put in a difficult situation and responsible for too much at once, I'd view that as a leadership bug, not their personal fault (or anything they should be held liable for). The weak links imo here are the firetruck driver and whoever that ATC reports to directly (i.e., there shouldn't have been an opportunity for this to happen—that's an executive failure, whether they want to take ownership or not).
The weak link is the system in place which puts so much work on so few staff.
The fire truck received the go ahead. They weigh 3x more than a normal firetruck. They're rushing to a different emergency. The plane is moving fast as hell. They can't just react instantaneously.
The ATC worker is clearly too stretched and such an incident was an inevitability. When they're shouting stop, they are no longer directly talking to the firetruck, which obscures the situation for everyone.
It is a terrible tragedy that will only be prevented with reform in staffing and safety procedures.
We aren’t in the aviation industry, and neither are we the NTSB.
Prosecutions and convictions do occur as a result of aviation incidents, pilots loose their jobs, pilots loose their licenses, ATC staff can be prohibited from ever working in the industry again.
The controller was talking to Frontier plane when he first said stop, then said stopstopTruck1stopstopstop and it would be easy for there to be a gap in processing for the driver of truck 1 because the verbiage all flowed in the same stanza that was started when addressing the Frontier flight.
Not arguing with the regulations, just pointing out that based on airport diagram[1], since the truck was crossing rwy on taxiway D, the CRJ was on the right approaching from behind. I have never been inside an airport firetruck, but I guess from the driver's seat the jet would be quite hard to see in this case.
"While driving on an aerodrome : Clear left, ahead, above and right
Scan the full length of the runway and the approaches for possible landing aircraft before entering or crossing any runway, even if you have received a clearance."
He was stopped until he received instructions to cross the runway from the person whose job it is to sit in a position with good visibility and tell people when they can cross runways. He wasn’t driving fast at all. The whole system is set up so that vehicles with blind spots (every large passenger jet) can safely move.
We can’t say that emergency vehicles should just stay in on dark and stormy nights.
>from the driver's seat the jet would be quite hard to see in this case.
..is what I was responding to.
>We can’t say that emergency vehicles should just stay in on dark and stormy nights.
This conclusion is flawed and doesn't apply to what I said.
If a truck can't see (conditions or not), then they shouldn't be on the same runway as takeoff/landing because...the consequences were severe despite the safeguards you mentioned, e.g. Not driving fast is relative and the "eyes" failed too initially.
“Vehicles with large blind spots don’t belong on the runway” is a completely untenable proposal.
Almost every airplane is bigger, blinder and slower than that truck. If it had been a plane cleared across the runway, this would have been so much worse.
Even if you want to exempt airplanes, it would require a complete rebuild of most major airports or using completely different emergency equipment. Every airport you have ever flown to commercially has ground vehicles crossing or operating on runways every day. It is simply not possible to operate a commercial airport without ground vehicles in aircraft movement areas, including runways.
The solution is not to spend billions on new trucks or access roads because of a single incident. It is to ensure that controllers, the people directly in charge of coordinating safe ground movement, have the mental bandwidth and tools to do their jobs. The fact that this was a truck and not an airplane is luck, making any discussions about truck cab visibility very much secondary. You have to go upstream of “trucks have blind spots” to truly prevent another of these incidents.
You even earlier: “ But if your truck has blind spots and vis is poor, you shouldn't be driving as fast if at all”
How do you propose that a truck not driving “at all” manage to drive on the runway? Driving on the runway, (or anywhere) is a subset of driving “at all”. Logically I can conclude that since you think that the trucks should not be driving “at all” due to blind spots, that you also think that they should not be driving on runways because of blind spots.
My argument paraphrased you to highlight a specific situation that would arise as a result of what you argued and to point out the folly of just banning any vehicle with a blind spot from crossing the runway. By extension, that planes can’t cross the runway either (the difference between a fire truck and an airplane crossing the runway is that the plane is larger, with bigger blind spots, less maneuverable, fragile and filled with people).
The solution is not to ban vehicles with blind spots from crossing runways, but to provide tools and guidance for those vehicles to operate safely. You could, for example, provide them with a trained observer in an elevated place that can be responsible for saying whether it is ok to be on the runway. We could give the person coordinating movement in the elevated place tools like radar mapping the ground, or automated semaphore systems at runway crossings (I’m describing things that already exist). Using a system like that we could do things like operate in 0 visibility where the weather causes the blind spot to be anything past the windshield (which is something that happens at JFK for example).
They were all, including truck 1, queued up at the stop line waiting for clearance to cross. Truck 1 received clearance to cross, he began crossing, then received instructions to stop after it was too late.
The rest of the emergency vehicles were stopped because they hadn’t been authorized. Truck 1 started moving because he had received specific instructions to do exactly what he was doing.
I take it you’re not a pilot, controller or someone who has ever worked an aviation radio?
"Truck 1 and company" were cleared to cross. A few seconds later, "truck 1" was instructed to stop.
Edit: Confirmed truck 1 was the one involved in the collision. Previous text: It is unclear which truck specifically was involved in the crash. In photos, the truck has the number 35 on it, not sure if that would preclude it from being identified as "truck 1" verbally.
Ah. I missed hearing that “and company” in the recording.
In any case, if they were cleared across the runway, and they were, it isn’t really on them. It doesn’t change the gist of the argument. The broader point is that it wasn’t that one truck was barreling around being reckless as implied by gp, it’s just that one truck made it out and the rest of the company had yet to start moving (whether because they saw the plane coming from their viewpoint farther back, or just hadn’t started moving yet, we will find out later). The entire company had stopped at the line, and when cleared across the lead truck was struck. Of course the rest were still stopped behind the line, there was a giant fire truck in their path moments before.
The instruction to stop is, to my pilots ear, irrelevant. Until an instruction is read back by the receiving party, it is worthless. It might not have been received, or received incorrectly. That’s the whole point of the readback, to ensure that the instruction was received correctly (notice how I missed the “and company”… a readback would have caught that). If there is not a readback, controllers are instructed to ask for one. On top of that, it was a panic instruction using non standard verbiage. If he was already past the line, the instruction to stop might have made it worse.
“I take it you haven’t ever worked with radio.. “. Seems like you haven’t a clue how any of this works. Doesn’t matter if they had radio clearance, the fire truck is responsible for ensuring runways is clear and not driving in front of plane.
I’m a certificated pilot in two countries, trained in this region, and own an airplane. I have a pretty good grasp how this works, but am willing to learn if you have citations besides the CFR pull quotes elsewhere in this thread.
All people (pilots included) are responsible for only following ATC instructions if it is safe/possible to do so. You aren’t supposed to land on a runway with other traffic on it, even if cleared. You aren’t supposed to cross a runway if there is a plane taking off or landing, even if cleared. You aren’t supposed to clear a vehicle onto a runway at the same time you cleared a plane to land (this one’s an assumption, I’m not a trained controller).
You are making the assumption that the truck did not check the runway, but keep in mind that it is a 30ish ton vehicle, and the plane was moving at 150 mph at touchdown, 100 mph at the time of impact. There very well may not have been a plane visible when the truck started moving. The truck might not have received the non-standard clearance revocation, or received it and tried to get off the runway by accelerating across, or received it and begun slowing in the path of the plane.
The truck driver could have prevented this, but they certainly aren’t the primary cause.
I very much doubt that you know the exact timing of the event. My guess is that you might have seen a video where some industrious editor put the ATC recordings over the leaked surveilance footage, but there is no way that is correctly synced.
With publicly available information we can sync it to within ~2 seconds. All trucks other than the first one were definitely in the process of stopping in between the first and second time ATC told them to stop (5 seconds apart).
I've seen the NTSB footage of the plane and helicopter crash in Washington. It is practically impossible to discern a landing plane over the lights of a big city at night. Next, the truck had been angled away from the plane approach, so it was coming from the right side (passenger side) and at back. There was zero chance that firetruck could have seen the plane in the seconds it covered hundreds of meters, flying at 200+ km/h. And also in that NTSB investigation there was a case of missed comms, when ATC recording clearly showed controller saying an important word, but it jot "jammed" in the process and there was silence at the receiving end instead of that word (in the middle of the transmission). Not saying it was a case here, but it is possible too.
Just like in that collision, it is possible there is no one single person to blame (apparently helicopter pilot was not outside of the legal corridor, despite the speculations), but it was a compounding error issue.
Truck was on a different frequency from the aircraft so they couldn’t even hear each others’ clearances.
Also first time ATC told the truck to stop it wasn’t too clear who the message was addressed to. It’s a bit hard to hear “Truck1” there, not clear who he wants to stop. The second time, one can argue by the time “stop” command was heard it might have been better to gun the engine. As the truck sort of slowed down in the middle of the runway.
> The crash has raised fears that operations at US airports are under extreme stress. Airports have been dealing with a shortage of air traffic controllers, exacerbated by brutal federal government personnel cuts by Donald Trump’s administration at the start of his second presidency.
So where there budget cuts or not? That was the claim. I have yet to find anything that suggests there were budget cuts, just vague mentions of "brutal federal government personnel cuts".
I'm just looking for: budget was X in <2026 and in 2026 it is Y, where X > Y
When I was young I took a tour of an air traffic control center near New York. By the end I knew it was not for me. Everyone looked stressed. Things have gotten so much worse.
This guy was doing at least 3 people's jobs even before the first emergency occurred.
Then it was an inevitable cascade failure situation. It was never his fault.
Management failed here. If its stupid but it works, its not stupid, is the old saying, but the reality I've seen is its still stupid but you got lucky. -Maxim 43
> I just hope they don't try to pin this on the controller who was on duty and move on without putting plans in place for some sort of structural change.
I also drew parallels to the Uberlingen mid-aid collision, but for a different reason.
The mid-air collision occurred because the Russian air crew maneuvered contrary to their TCAS instruction (it commanded them to climb, the controller ordered them to descend). They were not trained that TCAS is the ultimate authority in this situation; it exists precisely because the controller has already failed in their separation duties, and if you have TCAS giving you a resolution advisory, your aircraft is no longer under ATC control and you must ignore any ATC instruction to the contrary. The other aircraft was correctly following its TCAS instruction (descending) because their crew was trained in this. Both planes descended and still hit each other.
In this case, KLGA has RWSLs (Runway Status Lights), including RELs (Runway Entrance Lights) on taxiways, that behave like traffic lights on roads. This too is completely automated and is the last-ditch resort for when a controller has already failed in their separation duties. This system processes transponder data of nearby aircraft and determines whether an aircraft is about to take off (is on the runway and accelerating) or land (is approaching the runway and descending). In either case the RELs go red automatically, and the controller cannot override this.
The driver of the ARFF probably [1] placed more emphasis on the controller's clearance to cross than the lights telling him to stay put, in exactly the same way that the Russian air crew placed more emphasis on the controller's instruction to descend than their TCAS instruction to climb, not realising that they were maneuvering contrary to the thing that exists specifically to prevent these accidents.
EDIT: I am not assigning blame to the controller here. They are human, and humans make mistakes. That's why these systems exist. Having one person handle an airport the size of KLGA is an accident waiting to happen.
[1] Obviously this is unknown at this point, and is something the NTSB will investigate. The system could have been down for maintenance for example.
In both cases, the controller's fate was grim. Peter Nielsen (Überlingen) was murdered by a relative of a crash victim. Robin Lee Wascher (LA), whose own parents had died in an earlier air crash, was crucified in the media and never worked as a controller again.
Both precedents are applicable, because the Laguardia controller is also going to be savaged.
Is it possible to automate the job of an ATC controller? At least partially? Or at least just as a sanity check on every human decision? Not saying I want human ATC controllers replaced, but if there’s a severe staff shortage, I feel like a computerized version is better than nothing at all.
In this specific incident, there was a system in place called Runway Entrance Lights [0] that does serve as an automated sanity check on controllers commands. The surveillance video that is circulating shows that the system was working and indicated that the runway was not safe to enter. It's not clear yet why the truck entered the runway anyway.
I wonder if they thought that since they were responding to an emergency, and they were given clearance to cross by ATC, that that would override normal procedures. Kind of like how emergency vehicles cross a red light all the time when responding to an emergency.
It would be interesting to know whether that rule was onerous enough in practice that they had little choice but to break it in order to do their jobs effectively. They were responding to an emergency, seconds count, and they believed they had clearance from the controller.
> The surveillance video that is circulating shows that the system was working and indicated that the runway was not safe to enter.
A citation, please? The only video that I know of is [1].
[2] is my best mock up of the only video I have. I'm am not an expert, but my best read of that is that the RWSL is maybe? green to the taxiway¹ traffic, so, to me, the actual status of the RWSL at the time of the incident is "unknown"; that seems like something I should wait for the NTSB report, or at least someone with expert knowledge on. But your claims doesn't jive with the evidence I have, so that's what makes me ask for a citation.
¹but I think there are a number of problems with my own interpretation: I could be wrong about which lights are which; I am using the near-side lights, not the lights on the side the truck is entering from, and assuming them to be symmetrical (though what little I can see of the far side does seem to align with the near side); some of the lights I think are RWSLs & not RGLs look downright yellow, but that could be a property of the low quality of the video; there's the rather large problem of the plane on the runway that must then be explained.
Sorry for the late reply, and sorry for linking to reddit, but it was the first place I could find the right video. I saw this video linked at least a dozen times in the hours following the incident. I believe the clip you linked to is from the same video, but with the beginning cut off.
At approximately 1.5 seconds in my link, you can see one set of lights perpendicular to the runway turn off. I admit the the lighting/colors are not as crisp as I would like, but the lights that turn off are positionally consistent with the Runway Entrance Lights and the time at which they turn off (approximately 2 seconds before the plane enters the intersection) is also consistent with the operation of the Runway Entrance Lights system.
Furthermore, if the system was not operational it should have been NOTAMed as such, and I can find no such NOTAM so my default position is that the system was operational.
The fire station was located on the opposite side of runway 4 from the United plane. To avoid crossing the runway would mean having to travel a few extra miles around the thresholds (I assume).
I guess they could have found a route that wouldn't conflict with landing aircraft, but I doubt that's a practical option most of the time.
You sometimes have end around taxiways that are at one end of the runway and can be used when active. But that could be a massive diversion.
I know that Heathrow have multiple fire stations and rendezvous points for emergency services so that fire service can attend even when one runaway is closed to crossing. This could be needed to allow continued operations following a crash. It allows them to accept emergency landings more easily whilst maintaining emergency service to another active runway.
The REILs are part of ARFF training. Pilot training on it is also clear. The system is automated. It plots the direction and speed of anything approaching the runway and predicts a conflict. If the REILs are red it is HIGHLY likely there is a conflict that is missed by human error and you should not proceed without confirming. Don't just confirm cleared to cross, explicitly tell the controller "XYZ tower we have red runway entrance lights. Please confirm runway XX is clear".
The system is smart enough that if you get red bars to cross for an airplane departing once it passes your position the red clears because it knows the airplane is already past you. It is not dumb - it was deliberately designed to minimize false positives so everyone would trust it otherwise they might ignore it when it really counts. (AFAIK it very accurate in fact so the firetrucks weren't crossing because they distrusted the red lights).
This is just like all aviation incidents and indeed most incidents of any kind: the holes in the swiss cheese lined up.
The emergency aircraft couldn't find a free gate, creating a massive distraction for ATC, airport, et al. This is probably the primary domino that started the sequence. Had a gate been free this incident would not have happened. One big hole lined up.
Normally the aircraft would visually see the truck or the truck would visually see the airplane. But it was dark and rainy. Another hole lined up.
Everyone involved was rushing because noise abatement requires the airport to close at a certain hour. Thus everyone wanted to take-off or land before that shutdown. Another hole.
Normally the controller wouldn't issue the clearance to cross or their supervisor monitoring behind them would notice the error and override. But the controller and/or supervisor were distracted by the emergency. Another hole lined up.
The controller realized the error and issued a stop command but the fire truck proceeded anyway; they may or may not have heard the transmission. Another hole lined up.
Then someone else decided to jump on frequency during this busy time (we don't know who just yet) which may have prevented the controller's stop and/or go-around commands from being heard (another hole lined up).
The ARFF crew did not obey the REILs, accepting the clearance. Perhaps they thought the red lights were due to aircraft on short final and they still had time to cross? Perhaps it was some other misunderstanding of how that system works. Another hole lines up.
And the Air Canada jet was not paying attention to the chaos on frequency. There's a reason runway crossings are typically done on tower frequency: so aircraft can hear what is going on. But it was late at night and their brains probably didn't process what was happening. Or they were too close to touching down to have the bandwidth. Another hole lined up.
> The emergency aircraft couldn't find a free gate, creating a massive distraction for ATC, airport, et al.
Yes. And I want to add one more thing to this: the airplane with the "odour" issue was kinda ambivalent about the danger. They deemed it dangerous enough to declare an emergency, and request a gate then later ask for airstairs but not dangerous enough to pop the slides and just evacuate right there and then. I'm not saying this is wrong. Obviously they were evaluating the situation as new information was coming in. But it increased the workload of the ATC. They were trying to find a gate, and etc. If it was a clearer "mayday mayday mayday, aft cabin fire, we are evacuating" that might have been paradoxically less "work" for the ATC. Or at least more of a "practiced" scenario.
> Perhaps it was some other misunderstanding of how that system works.
Yeah. That's a big one. Total speculation but maybe they thought the airplane with the "odour" issue was keeping it red?
A great deal of ATC relies on automation, such as systems like ASDE-X, which is used at LGA. ASDE-X uses radar and vehicle transponders (among other things) to detect collision hazards on the ground. Unfortunately ASDE-X only works if every vehicle has a transponder.
NTSB's M.O. has always been that there is never just one cause. A human mistake that costs lives is never that simple. There is a system that trained the person, a set of incentives that put the person into that place, a set of safeguards that should have existed to prevent the mistake from causing life loss, and a regulatory framework to occasionally verify all of the above. I would expect that "the controller made a mistake" would be ~one paragraph in a 100-page report.
Exactly. In the field of accident analysis and prevention the "swiss cheese model"[1] is very popular for this reason. It acknowledges that every layer of the system will have holes, and that ideally every layer when stacked up provides complete coverage. If something bad happens that means that holes every layer had to have aligned and the whole stack bears some responsibility for the outcome.
ATC are under contract to not be able to quit, basically high stress slavery and the gov't put the screws to them. The only thing that will fix this is the rich can't fly their private jets
What structural change would permit a worker to take initiative and say "Hey, these working conditions are wrong/inadequate and I will not safely do my job today unless proper changes are made", without risk of getting fired by higher-ups?
Empowering workers to make safety-critical meta-decisions does not seem to be a feature of actually-existing capitalism.
What you're describing is already well known in the aviation industry. Promotion of a positive safety culture is a key element if the Safety Management System (SMS) framework
> What structural change would permit a worker to take initiative and say "Hey, these working conditions are wrong/inadequate and I will not safely do my job today unless proper changes are made", without risk of getting fired by higher-ups?
Well, what you are describing is a strike, and it is currently illegal for ATC to strike, so in theory one possible structural change would be to make it legal for the workers to do what you're describing.
the headline literally says "could", not that it did. can you point to evidence that DOGE cutbacks did negatively affect aviation safety, particularly with regards to ATCs?
Yes, but the problems have been driven by the relentless deregulation of critical industries and infrastructure primarily driven by a specific political bloc. In the next US election, we should vote for candidates that promise systemic change and government overhaul, not further deregulation and handouts to corporations.
Can you elaborate on what change you would like to occur?
I have voted based on getting particular people nominated within a federal agency, requires the President to pick someone who will 100% be from their party, and a Senate committee that will confirm them
people tend to think "I'm voting against my best interests" without knowing that the agency control was my best interest as it will most likely continue shaping an industry far beyond any particular administration
I could see that happening again with your abstract, vague, and ambiguous idea. Just say what you mean specifically, use your words, so I know if it's something that could steer my vote or not
You had two options and one was clearly far worse than the other. This nuanced-excuse-making and “the democrats also occasionally do things I don’t like” is lazy. Take responsibility for letting the mob take over - even if it was just by inaction.
Very doubtful whatever agency you can conjour up as an excuse will be more impactful than the country wide changed induced by the overall administration
It bothers me that everyone is laser focused on poor ATC staffing and working conditions (which is very valid, don't get me wrong). I think airport capacity should be fixed depending on ATC staffing. We need to have less air travel.
The way I think about it is this: substandard ATC staffing is just as bad as lacking jetways or damaged runways. When the airport can't land planes because of physical capacity constraints, flights get cancelled or delayed (literally happening today at LGA, flights are getting canceled because they're down one runway). The carriers need to eat the costs of forcing too much demand on ATCs.
You are correct. Robustness requires a system that is working within it's tolerance margin, and stressing that inevitably leads to failure. A fault-tolerant system in this case would require a large amount of redundant humans. Unfortunately, the capitalist mindset prevents accepting any amount of "waste" as tolerable, which makes a robust system impossible to implement over time. Every system touched by a capitalist optimizer will eventually fail.
The idea that waste must be reduced is killing society, and this mindset must be addressed first before any other safety-critical system can be made reliable again.
LaGuardia did have a fully staffed ATC, and there's zero evidence this controller was overworked. You seem to be prematurely ascribing cause when nothing has been investigated yet.
The evidence that this controller was overworked is that practically all controllers in the US at present are overworked. As such, that should be treated as the null hypothesis, and it would require substantial evidence to show that he isn't overworked.
Its previous head had a term that didn't expire until 2028 but he resigned after pressure from Elon Musk (who didn't like that he got fined), now a Trump-friendly head has been installed. What, realistically, would be the consequences if he lied? Likely none. Government officials lying on record is an every day occurrence these days.
It does not at all mean that this controller was overworked when this crash happened; that would be failed reasoning and misuse of evidence.
It just raises the question, which should be looked at.
It's scary that so many don't seem to know the difference. This is how misinformation starts and spreads.
You're 100% right, a "Trump-friendly" administrator has been "installed" so we can't trust the FAA's conclusions. The last guy quit so this guy is definitely going to lie.
The parent post was unjustly flagged for no other reason than facts make overly emotional people here squirm with anger. Pathetic and lame.
This is worthy of losing flagging privileges IMO.
The Secretary of Transportation said on record at the first press conference that reports this guy was working alone in the tower are INACCURATE. The actual number is the responsibility of the NTSB to disclose.
95% of this discussion is people blowing smoke out of their ass as per usual.
From VAS Aviation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY, or possibly in the comments, it was noted that there were 2 people on - one in the tower, one elsewhere in charge of approach. So perhaps, it's innacurate because he was working "with" the person on approach, but still accurate to what we would all call "working alone"?
It used to be that there was always a supervising controller on duty, who kind of rotated around each active controller, acted as backup for breaks, etc. for this class of airport - from my layman reading at least. This still seems to be the paper requirement.
So the minimum here would be 3 controllers given that nights setup. One for approach/ground, one for departure. Obviously you can argue more would be appropriate to segregate duties further, but it was a night shift headed into airport shutdown.
There seems to have been two working. The supervising controller double booked as a primary controller for departure at the time of incident. The fact the incident controller wasn’t immediately relieved of duty and had to spend 30 minutes shutting the airport down himself seems to match this explanation.
From what I’ve read on the matter for this tower not having a supervising controller was rather normalized - which is outside of SOP and something you need to report to management every time it happens. For this incident there was one - but sounds like one in name only. Once normalization of deviance happens, working in a way where two controllers that on paper should be sharing duties - but in practice are splitting them - seems exactly how I’d expect things to go.
But this is all speculation at this point of course. NTSB report will be interesting.
Either way - it has been clear for decades ATC needs both a massive surge in the staffing pipeline as well as a legitimate modernization program competently implemented. It’s certainly not a problem that started or remained in any single administration. Even if one or another had been worse, others sure as hell haven’t done much at all to fix the situation.
Everyone is stomping their feet saying the answer should be more than the number which has not yet been disclosed, so we don't know, but yet everyone also refuses to provide a definite number.
So tell me, for an airport that only has two runways which intersect, at LGA's volume, what is the correct number of controllers that should be working that field?
This also assumes the FAA hasn't already done this math and the gaming-chair experts know more than the FAA (which they don't).
If a member of this administration said he wasn’t working alone, that’s solid evidence he was.
The evidence that he was overworked seems pretty damned obvious. He forgot about an entire airplane and put a fire truck in its path. The evidence of overwork is strewn all around LGA.
In general, I can. In LaGuardia? Aside from right after 9/11 and during COVID-19 when almost all commercial travel stopped, I cannot.
I don't think people saying this stuff quite understand how busy LGA is even at night. I'd even go as far as to say that three minimum on duty with two in the tower at all times (for a ground/air split), would be the bare minimum for any hour or situation at LGA.
It does quiet down eventually. There's no scheduled departures 22:55-5:45 and only a handful of arrivals 23:59-6:45.
However, arrivals stay pretty heavy right up until 23:59 even on schedule and if you've got a lot of delayed flights (not exactly uncommon at LGA) - you may still have a lot of departures going out in the 23:00 hour.
I would not be surprised to learn that they're staffed to an appropriate level for what the schedule says is supposed to be operating at that time, but a very inadequate level for what actually winds up operating at that time on many days.
Initial analysis suggests they were running about 75% of full capacity in flight ops in the 15min prior to the accident. I doubt they were staffed to 75% of the daytime peak.
When the airport is closed, in case there was an emergency that needed to reroute. One person on then makes sense?
La Guardia appears to handle 400 flights a day, 22 an hour. I see 6 moving planes right now (https://www.flightradar24.com/airport/lga); hopefully they have more than one person on?
400 flights a day is 16-17 per hour and those are going to be mostly during the day. As someone else points out there is a ~6 hour stretch overnight with no scheduled departures. That's somewhat common even at large hubs.
I don't want to blow your mind but if the airport closes there aren't going to be any controllers in the tower.
Is he? I can see the number of hours worked as evidence of a shortage, but prima facie it is not obvious that a single controller handling both ground and air is evidence of a 'shortage' if it is routinely considered feasible in the industry. It could just be an efficiency choice for low-traffic times. Based on some googling since I'm not an expert it seems this is called 'position combining' in the US and is pretty routine across the world. Therefore, if this is a problem the primary cause cannot be US policy because non-US airports also do this thing.
While searching I did find this other document where a GC (LC appears to be Local Control for local air traffic and GC is ground control) controller complains about combining due to short-staffing https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=19837915&Fi...
Well, it'll be an interesting report from the NTSB at least.
An obvious issue is going to be that while it's supposed to be a lower-traffic time, if you've had delays cascading down the day - it may not be in reality. If the staffing doesn't adjust for delays shifting the time of flights, it would probably often leave you with an overworked controller.
Looking at the normal schedules - if all is on schedule there'd be no departures in the 23:00 hour but you'd still have the arrivals side running pretty heavily. However, once you factor in things not being on schedule, as they evidently were not on that night, you get:
----------
The 15min before the accident had 14 flight operations (per Juan Browne/blancolirio going through the ADSB playback). And that's in marginal weather and at night, which makes things more complicated.
That is 75% of the official maximum capacity of the airport - during the main part of the day where there's government-imposed caps on flights, it's capped at 74 operations per hour or about 18.5 per 15min.
As such, it seems apparent that you would need just as much staffing (or at least 75% as much) at that time to safely handle the traffic volume that was occurring that night as you did in the main part of the day.
Unless the normal staffing here was just 2 people, it seems clear that 1 is inadequate.
I don’t have time to check flight logs but I personally landed at LGA coming from MDW on Sunday. And I also know people who got diverted within the hour coming back to LGA that night. 30-40 minutes doesn’t seem accurate. That aside, if you’ve ever done operational staffing, you’d know that you should probably have at least one redundancy. When there is any chance of emergency or two events happening simultaneously, you should have more than one person.
One last meta point. We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and the highest air travel prices (some part is a function of longer distances I know). We should expect that we have ample coverage, if not over-coverage, at all times for one of our major metropolitan airports. Pay them.
12am-5am is very quiet, at about 1 per hour. But the accident happened during the 10pm-12am time slot, which is not as busy as other times of day, but can still have workload spikes as evidenced by this situation.
In this case there were two arrivals within 4 minutes of each other and two departures, in addition to the emergency plane that had just aborted takeoff.
Which is a completely reasonable amount of traffic for one controller to handle. This wasn't the controller's fault. The firetruck received a clearance, had that clearance revoked, and either didn't hear the revocation or ignored it.
If you have ever spent time listening to LiveATC you will realize that like everyone, "tunnel ear" is a real thing - if United 1002 has received the clearance/instructions they expect, read them back, and are proceeding it can be moderately difficult to get their attention again, even with perfect verbiage.
The controller was not guilty of malfeasance, but clearing the trucks onto the runway with an airliner on short final was a mistake, no matter whatever else one could say about it.
Same as if the radios stopped working or otherwise communication fails. Execute the planned procedures (which vary).
Often Approach will take over the "tower" and operate in crippled mode (no clearances to cross active runways, you must go down to the end kind of thing).
Some airports are uncontrolled at various times and would revert to that. Some airlines would require the pilot execute a missed approach and deviate to a towered airport, others may allow them to land.
That seems mad, given the volume of traffic they're working - even without emergencies. My local GA field is single controller, and that's VFR, grass runways, averages 40-50 movements/day.
Maybe. Lets see what the NTSB recommendations say.
However despite the downvotes I still haven't seen evidence that they were running understaffed at that moment.
What I do know is that the developing emergency on the tarmac due to an apparently hazardous smell in another plane is likely the cause of the confusion that led to this incident. That's a trigger that could have been exacerbated by fatigue but we don't have any evidence of that yet.
> I still haven't seen evidence that they were running understaffed at that moment.
I think the disagreement you see is based on the definition of what "understaffed" means. Having one ATC to do ground and air control simultaneously seems like an under-staffing situation to begin with, regardless of whether it's a common practice.
There is also the angle of: even if there is an appropriate amount of controllers in the tower at a given time, how they do it can also hint at the issue. Being an ATC is a taxing job, mandatory overtime and 60 hours work weeks screams understaffing to me.
It is possible for ATC to be understaffed as a profession, LGA to be understaffed as an airport, individual controllers to be overworked, and for it to be 100% reasonable to have a single controller at LGA in the middle of the night.
> Having one ATC to do ground and air control simultaneously seems like an under-staffing situation to begin with
Do we have evidence that one controller did all ground and air? The only evidence I've seen was the NY Times said that, according to a source, two controllers were working and two more were in the building.
In situations like this there is as lot of disinformation. The best thing to do is not add to it - a pile of bad information is not improved by piling more on. The best thing is to patiently find reliable info and stick to it.
> That one controller was handling both ground and air ...
Why do you (or why does anyone) think that? My point in the GP was, I have yet to see evidence that there was only one controller, and I have seen evidence that there were two.
Does someone say there is only one controller working? Just because that particular recording has only one controller doesn't mean nobody else is working.
Some people here coded the buttons that sometimes don't work when you check in for your flight. That makes them aviation experts. How dare you question wild assumptions.
> It is common at LGA for one controller to be handling Tower and Ground late at night.
What happens when they need the bathroom, or have some kind of medical problem? If it's really a common case for one controller to handle things, the system itself needs to be fundamentally rethought.
Approximately one per minute in the 15 minute span proceeding this crash, including one that had an emergency takeoff rejection and was being maneuvered along with the emergency support vehicles that were being sent to attend to it
"Funny" enough if this controller had had a medical emergency (or just bad sushi) and been off the radios, this wouldn't have happened because the fire truck would not have received clearance to cross the runway and wouldn't have. Or at least would have crossed like the airport was uncontrolled, been much more careful and announced itself, and likely have seen the landing aircraft.
And if an aircraft needs to land due to an emergency? It’s amazing things work as well as they do, the system relies on only one thing going wrong at a time. This accident was an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time.
Every accident is an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time.[0]
I'm going to pretend to know exactly what would happen in that precise scenario but I'm confident most commercial pilots get enough training to be able to handle it.
>> Every accident is an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time.
You are defeating your own argument :-) Its exactly because every accident is an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time...that you need...multiple layers of control and safety to catch it through each hole of the cheese.
One of the things you learn as a pilot is how to recognize that you need to go into emergency mode if you will. Call it high-alert if you want.
You need to recognize when something is out of the ordinary and treat it as an emergency (perhaps not a literal pan-pan/mayday emergency) sooner rather than later, and do things that may end up to have been unnecessary (like executing a go-around because emergency vehicles were on the move).
One controller on two frequencies is another example - that works fine in normal situations, but during an emergency response, perhaps the channels should be mixed; giving the pilots in the air a chance to hear the incorrect clearance onto their runway.
After all, an active runway is really more of an "air" control thing than a ground one.
An empty tower at La Guardia with a bunch of airplanes in the air not getting a reply to their calls is Die Hard 2 stuff. Spare me the Pete Hegseth school of ATC...
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The GP is literally about a lone controller in the tower having a medical episode and what would happen after that.
The pilots would execute untowered approach procedures, a small airport with little to no traffic and VFR flight you may self-announce on frequency, a larger airport you go back to approach, etc.
Each of those flights should have an alternate and be prepared (have enough fuel) to divert. If there is a fuel emergency then self-announcing is likely appropriate as the plane is coming down anyway, but that is multiple things going wrong.
A big part of it is what category of airport it is, and plane. General aviation almost always goes to self-announce (which includes some business jets perhaps, they often land at untowered airports) but not category 135 air travel or whatever it is.
You should try harder, because I'm not making any comment on regulation whatsoever. There are procedures that every controller and pilot knows for how to handle loss of radio contact.
There are millions of people who are self employed in an industry where they could be maimed or killed if they screw up who manage to make it to retirement.
I think the better question is how you get a system in which people are only responsible for any one facet to get the same performance out of people that a painter can get out of himself when he's setting up his own ladder that he personally has to climb on.
I don't think the GPs point is about personal safety of workers, but rather critical safety systems that rely on one person with no backups. Like an ATC tower for a busy airport staffed by a single person on an overnight shift.
A painter who does a bad job setting up a ladder is going to have a bad time, a lone ATC operator having a heart attack potentially puts multiple large aircraft full of people in danger...
Normally? Zero. LGA has a curfew from midnight to six AM, April 5-December 31.
In practice? It depends. Delays have a tendency to cascade in the air travel system and the Port Authority can curtail or cancel the curfew at their discretion. How frequently do exceptions to normal ops have to happen for it to be unreasonable to use "normal ops traffic" as a justification for scheduling a single controller? Ultimately, controllers have to control the traffic that they get, not the traffic that they want/expect to get, and a system that is overly optimized becomes brittle and unable to deal with exceptions to the norm.
Looking at the things he needs to juggle at the same time, is it really reasonable? Any standard we are referring here? Sure such cases are rare but that's why we have redundancies for critical positions.
> One controller overnight is completely reasonable.
Do you really think it's appropriate to have zero margin for handling unusually high ATC workloads? Because we just saw what happens when you have zero margin for handling unusually high ATC workloads: people start dying.
"... we have an odor on the plane as well here at this time. We are going to be going back to the gate, request fire as well."
- United pilot
"2384, it is oder like a smoke odor ...like from fire?"
- Control
"No, it was a weird odor. I don't know exactly how to describe it. But yeah... we can't get a hold of anyone at the ops for a gate assignment."
- United pilot
"Ground, United 2384 is declaring an emergency. The flight attendants in the back are feeling ill because of the odor. We will need to go into an available gate at this time."
- United pilot
"... the fire trucks are over there. They're going to bring a stair truck just in case you guys do want to evacuate. Let me know if you do."
- Control
"Copy, yeah, we prefer to wait on a gate, but I mean, again, we only got so much time here because there's still a bit of odor in the back of the airplane."
- United pilot
"646, number two, clear to land 4."
- Control
"Truck one and company, cross four Delta."
- Control
"Truck one and company, crossing four at Delta."
- Truck 1
There was a single traffic controller handling the entire airport. This was bound to happen and will keep happening unless things change. It's absurd that the US hasn't been able to fix its ATC shortage in decades.
Currently over 41% of facilities are reliant on mandatory overtime, with controllers frequently working 60-hour weeks with only four days off per month.
Counterpoint. It's Regen's fault. He's the guy who decided that a high priority of the government was making sure air traffic controllers had no power to fight back against being horrifically overworked (because unions are evil you see)
Wasn't it Congress who passed 5 U.S.C. § 7311. which says a person may not “accept or hold” a federal job if they “participate in a strike” against the U.S. government.
They were striking for less outdated tools, improving staffing levels, and other safety improvements. The solution was to give them the things they wanted.
I’m not saying he didn’t ignore a real problem - but it’s been 45 years since the 1981 airline strike. Surely the blame ought to be spread around our incompetent Federal government.
This is mostly nonsense, by the way. While Reagan won his presidential elections by a huge margin, he never had the House of Representatives on his side, only the Senate. So it's not like he had a unique position to make changes that hasn't happened since. In fact, any government since then could have undone any or all of these "everything broken in the USA" things. But they didn't. Probably because people like, oh, the viewers of this video, will keep blaming a dead president instead of them. Hah! It's beautiful in a way...
You don't need a union to have effective management. It should also be their incentive not to cause people's death by overworking employees. Which is also dumb because it costs more to overwork then hire appropriately with overtime laws... cops exploit this all the time to steal money from taxpayers. (The ones in Seattle only get caught when they accidently charge over 24 hours of overtime in a day)
Union rules that say only a particular classification of employee is allowed to pick up a small package from a loading dock and move it twenty feet are also bad.
The blame can go to the top, for not managing correctly.
If it was a traveler's union, maybe. Cop unions don't result in better outcomes for the general public, and there's no reason a controller's union won't end up just boosting pay and having a rubber room for hacks (referencing NYC schools paying teachers to not work because they're either predators or terrible at teaching, but being unable to fire them).
Yes, they should all have taken actions. But also, it is much more difficult to fix something broken once the damage has settled in. I guess none of them was willing to risk the disruption a fix would have caused. And the system seemed to have held up for quite a while. Weren't there some mass firings of ATC personal at the beginning of the Trump presidency?
The bottom line is: don't break things that are difficult or impossible to fix.
It might sound simple, but won't tunnels lower the strength of the runways (I presume that's where you would put them)? Strengthening that would create an expensive solution to a basic communication problem. That's like saying instead of 4 way stops, we elevate the two intersecting roads to avoid collision, just because someone may have ran the stop sign.
Also, ground vehicles typically need to be on the ground for a reason. Why seperate them?
When I heard about the crash I immediately recalled the recent articles about ATC shortages and overworked ATC's. And here we are. ONE dude running ATC for LaGuardia. Mind boggling.
I place no blame on the ATC as they were doing everything they could given the shit sandwich they were handed. I see this happening all over with staffs getting pared down to minimums, more (sometimes unpaid) over time, prices going up, and no raises.
I’m not trying to minimize a tragedy, but maybe this is almost the perfect wake up call?
Not many fatalities but nevertheless a spectacular collision. At a major hub airport in a major city. It’s hard to look away from, the cause is obvious, and all that without hundreds of deaths.
It's not minimizing, it's galvanizing. 100% A wake up call. I don't fly much but I was bothered by the earlier ATC stories and now I don't feel safe at all.
Agreed. There are a whole bucketload of problems, each one contributing to the staff shortage. The US has problems that other countries don't have (or have less of). It's a long-term organisational issue. None of it is insurmountable, but things need to be done differently, and the politics of that may be insurmountable.
Being an air-traffic controller anywhere in the world is a very intense job at times, and needs a huge amount of proficiency that only a small number of people are capable of doing. Couple that with:
- the FAA expects you to move to where ATCs are needed, so many of the qualified applicants give up when they hear where the posting is. You can't force them to take the job!
- the technology is decades out of date and the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (it's seriously called that) won't roll out until 2028 at the earliest
- Obama's FAA disincentivised its traditional "feeder" colleges that do ATC courses to "promote diversity", net outcome was fewer applicants
- Regan broke the union in the 1980s
- DOGE indiscriminately decimated the FAA like it did most other government departments
> Obama's FAA disincentivised its traditional "feeder" colleges that do ATC courses to "promote diversity", net outcome was fewer applicants
It was much worse than that. Students who had already spent years studying to be air traffic controllers through the CTI program were subject to a sudden policy change that disqualified them from entering the profession unless they passed a “biographical questionnaire.”
85% of candidates failed this questionnaire, but the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (the organization that pushed for this change to begin with) was feeding the “right” answers to its own members.
This test is completely insane. What were the people making it thinking? It feels like half of the scored questions have point values assigned at random. Why does being unemployed for 1-2 months before enrolling in the program award you 10 points, 5-6 months is 8 points, yet 3-4 is a fat zero? There's so many questions with these random score assignments. Why does having real qualifications related to your job only give you a point or two, but some random factoid like taking unrelated courses or doing poorly in college history give upwards of 15 points? Why is child labor rewarded, with more points given the earlier you started?
Unless I'm missing something, this couldn't have been designed by a human being with normal goals in mind. This feels like a test that was created to act as a locked door that you could only pass by knowing the exact password, the sequence of lies you had to produce. That anyone's career was at the mercy of THIS is deranged. What the hell is going on in the US?
I actually looked into becoming an ATC controller a year or two ago (I love aviation) and they had an age cap of ~30 to start training. I'm 32, so ruled out.
According to NYT it seems like there were 2 controllers and “2 more in the building”. They also wrote that 2 seems normal for the late slower time of the night.
Not saying this is the right number of controllers to have, just sharing what I read in NYT.
The US intentionally created the ATC shortage. From Wikipedia:
The PATCO Strike of 1981 was a union-organized work stoppage by air traffic controllers (ATCs) in the United States. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) declared a strike on August 3, 1981, after years of tension between controllers and the federal government over long hours, chronic understaffing, outdated equipment, and rising workplace stress. Despite 13,000 ATCs striking, the strike ultimately failed, as the Reagan administration was able to replace the striking ATCs, resulting in PATCO's decertification.
The failure of the PATCO strike impacted the American labor movement, accelerating the decline in labor unions in the country, and initiating a much more aggressive anti-union policy by the federal government and private sector employers.
Why drain resources training more controllers when we're having energy collapse? Even if they start pumping oil, it will only delay the inevitable. What would we do with all the extra controllers if we have to fire them in ten years anyway?
No expert here, low-time GA decades ago. I regard these incidents as aspects of the universal race to the economic bottom.
The workloads are too high. Nobody running life-critical operations should be working 60+ hour weeks and overnight shifts. We've known for decades how these practices increase errors. One effective answer is to dilute the workload by hiring more people. But this slows the race to lower costs, so it isn't done. We need to spend more on people.
With all the advances in technology, can there be no navigation app that can just tell you you're on a collision course instead of relying exclusivly on playing broken phone between flying and driving meatbags via a sitting one?
There is actually a set of lights which should have displayed red towards the trucks.
Were they not operating correctly, or did the driver ignore them is one of the questions the investigation will answer.
The system is called Runway Status Lights. And in case there is a disagreement between the ATC clearance and the lights the drivers are supposed to not enter the runway.
In the video it looks as if the other emergency vehicles have stopped and only the first truck is driving. Maybe they missed the light or it turned red just after the first truck passed the light.
The description is a bit vague, but I guess this should've automatically caught the landing plane immediately after it got the approval and started landing?
> When activated, these red lights indicate that ... there is an aircraft on final approach within the activation area
It is not working based on approval but based on sensors observing the airplane on final. Even if the plane is landing without clearance, even if the ATC is held hostage by a terorist or having a stroke the lights should turn red when an airplane is approaching the runway from the sky.
“RWSL is driven by fused multi-sensor surveillance system information. Using
Airport Surface Detection Equipment-Model X (ASDE-X), external surveillance
information is taken from three sources that provide position and other
information for aircraft and vehicles on or near the airport surface. RWSL safety
logic processes the surveillance information and commands the field lighting
system to turn the runway status lights on and off in accordance with the motion of
the detected traffic.”
To get an idea of the crazy workload some of these controllers are experiencing, the beginning of this video has an untrimmed 1-minute excerpt of ATC communications for Newark approach. Even the rest of the video, which has some editing, has no silences removed.
> LGA Tower initiated a takeoff clearance for an aircraft waiting on 13 when we were only 300 feet high on final for 22. The voice accepting the takeoff clearance, most likely the First Officer, did not seem concerned, but the departing aircraft seemed to hesitate moving for a couple seconds. I believe this was because the Captain of that flight was likely the pilot flying, and was in a position to see how close we were to landing. I think he or she thought twice before starting their takeoff roll. Due to the thick smoky haze from the Canadian wildfires and a possible helicopter in the area, I judged it safer to continue the approach and land around 10 seconds after the departing aircraft crossed our path, instead of suddenly going around and trusting that the helicopter was not near the departure end of 22. The guidance in ATC’s 7110.65 does not seem to give guidance on exactly how close aircraft in this situation can get. Based on today’s and close calls I have seen over the years for Runway 27R/35 at PHL and 22L/29 at EWR, it seems to be a judgement call by the Local Controller. Another concern is that the portion of the runway status light system visible to aircraft departing 13 appears to have been disabled. In the past, this system provided an additional layer of safety to prevent runway incursions. Now, I never see it light up anymore when I am waiting in position on 13 while a plane lands on 22. The pace of operations is building in LGA. The controllers are pushing the line. On thunderstorm days, LGA is starting to feel like DCA did before the accident there. Please do something. At least turn the RWSL for 13 back on.
I think it's misleading to act like this was some kind of whistleblower.
"He said LaGuardia was “very well staffed”, with 33 certified controllers and more in training. He said the goal was to have 37 on staff."
I'm just tired of bullshit rhetoric. 33 is less than 37, that's "understaffed" not "very well staffed". Fuck Sean and our "leaders"... they speak with unauthority and spiritlessness.
I am alarmed at the high number of supposed engineers on this thread that are seemingly unaware of how safety-critical systems work. Literally every other piece of this system has redundancy built into it. Robustness is never optional in a scenario involving human safety.
TCAS is much simpler than your proposal. Ensuring that traffic can't get too close to you in midair is a different problem from analyzing complex, non-linear movements at tightly-packed airports. How do you implement this system while avoiding false positives?
Imagine that you're landing at one of two parallel runways. There's a plane lining up on the other runway. You can't have proximity warnings like TCAS, because this is a safe situation even though you get close to the other plane. What if that plane is taxiing towards your runway? You can't predict its movements until it starts entering the runway because it may just stop at the hold short line, as it should. Extrapolate this simple scenario to anything that could ever happen at airports with a large variety of actors, and you'll start to see why everyone in the world is still relying on humans to do this.
The real answer is that the airline industry is huge, and adding more safety measures will cost billions, and it'll dampen the stock market in the short term. Also, because there's ample room for finger-pointing, the decision-makers who could push for better safety are unlikely to be sued. Your local theme park is probably obsessive with maintenance and safety features, because they'll definitely get a lawsuit if someone is injured.
> Nasa reports show repeated warnings of close calls before crash...
So was there an increase in repeated warnings before crash, or was there just the normal amount of warnings over a long period of time? If you go to that database they are referencing (using that web1.0 interface), there are a lot of reports, even ones marked 'critical'.
I hear a lot of folks ascribing safety to physical human shortages in staffing.
Looking at airport security, it's impossible not to ascribe waste, fraud and abuse if indeed there is a lack of ATC hires causing this. We can go without a greeter at the beginning of the security line, or a pre-screener of boarding passes halfway through the security line and have an extra ATC on duty. If you can't find the extra $ for that you're either blind or we need to charge each passenger $1 more.
The truth is, this sort of situational control shouldn't really be given to a human.
This is exactly the kind of thing a computer should be handling, in the same way we don't have a traffic guard at every intersection. Yes I understand airports are complex. So you have a computer and a human, and they work together.
One of the issues being explored is that although US radar is aged, surface vehicles can be equipped with ASDE-X transponders to be more visible to ATC systems. https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/asde-x
The vehicle that crashed into the plane did not have one and thus no automated alert was triggered.
> The FAA determined that ASRP effectiveness would be greatly enhanced if NASA, rather than the FAA, accomplished the receipt, processing, and analysis of raw data. This would ensure the anonymity of the reporter and of all parties involved in a reported occurrence or incident and, consequently, increase the flow of information necessary for the effective evaluation of the safety and efficiency of the NAS.
I work in exactly this space as a NASA contractor. I don't actually have a massive amount of insight into the FAA, but my impression is that they don't do much in the way of R&D on their own. I think (without hard numbers mind you) the vast majority of FAA R&D work starts at NASA or other government labs and gets transferred to the FAA when it gets to a sufficient level of maturity. In that context, it's even more natural for NASA to host the ASRS system.
Fast, cheap or good. Pick two.
It seems like they've been prioritizing fast (lots of planes) and cheap (low staffing, outdated equipment) and paying lip service to good (safety).
Everybody is, not just the pilots. The US ATC system has been in a state of induced crisis since Reagan broke the union's back in the 1980s. Then Trump took office, laid off a bunch of people, cancelled a bunch of hires, and immediately that led to the conditions for the Potomac / DCA collision.
The US is just in an active state of collapse in many areas, including air travel.
It is surprising to me that airports do not use an interlock system for deconflicting the various paths segments that may be occupied by a vehicle. Trains have used mechanical ones since the 1800s [0]. The story and comments seem to indicate the only thing preventing collisions is the mind of one person--that sounds insane.
While it's not as sophisticated, there is a technology called Runway Entrance Lights [0] that does somewhat the same thing in the specific context of this incident. LGA is one of 20 airports around the country where this system is installed, and you can clearly see that the system was functioning if you know where to look in the surveillance video that is circulating online. For whatever reason, the truck did not respect the indicator that they should not enter the runway. So in this specific incident, short of rail-like physical limitations on movement, I think it's unlikely that any amount of additional technology would have helped.
A runway light does not physically prevent a vehicle from entering a restricted area in the same way that an interlock would. Not saying it’s practical but an interlock would have indeed prevented an accident of this type.
Yes, I get that. But an airport is not a rail network. The question is how you would actually implement physical interlocks on an airport in a way that works and is safe while controlling movement of everything from a pickup truck to an A380? It's an incredibly hard problem to solve. And keeping in mind too that the Runway Status/Entrance Lights first started development over 30 years ago and are still only deployed at 20 airports, despite being a vastly simpler system than one controlling physical barriers.
I'm curious how much of a buffer there is between the time the sensors detect the airplane and it being safe to enter the runway.
Is it definitely safe to cross the runway in a vehicle moving a normal speed up to the moment before the lights turn red? Is it safe for a little bit afterward? Or is it unsafe even a little before the lights turn red?
If school busses can look both ways before crossing train tracks you'd think a firetruck would look both ways for airplanes coming down a runway. Don't want to blame the firemen though - this was a series of extrmeemly unfortuante scenarios and people trying to keep the airport running safely. For years people have been on soap boxes saying the FAA/NTSB needs to do better, and yet year after year they are poorly run and poorly funded.
A quick Google gives me that a 737 typically lands between 144 and 180 mph. I think that's quite a lot faster than most people are watching out for. Good news is they are bigger than cars and so easier to spot at a distance but I'm still skeptical that "look before you cross the runway" is sufficiently safe. Keep in mind that the planes may not even be on the ground yet - at the top end in 30s they could go from a 1.5 miles away in the sky (and up to 300-400ft in the air) to plowing through your position (iirc runways are about 2 miles long for jets).
I wonder if it'd even be reliable to see such a plane coming fast enough.
Now multiply that by the dozens of planes in your vicinity, and by the 100ish big US airports.
> I think that's quite a lot faster than most people are watching out for
That isn't even beyond the top speed of a car, which non-trained humans are very well capable of tracking by sight - to talk of airport workers that are specifically trained to look for air traffic. It really is not that hard to tell that an aircraft is on short final if you are actually looking at it.
With four miles of visibility in light rain at night, the aircraft should have been perfectly visible (in a vacuum); what remains to be determined is why the ARFF crew did not see it. The answer to that could range from "they didn't look at all" to "the orientation of the runway relative to the surrounding neighbourhoods meant that the CRJ's lights got lost in the city lights".
Does anyone know why the fire truck was driving across the runway in the first place? Was it a patrol, repositioning the truck, or was there an active incident that they were responding to? Seems like reducing the number of times you have to drive across an active runway is in general a good thing, but perhaps at an airport this old this is the only way to get from A to B.
> Does anyone know why the fire truck was driving across the runway in the first place?
Yes we know. There was an other airplane who declared an emergency and was about to evacuate the passengers on the tarmac. The other plane in question had two aborted takeoffs, and then they smelled some “odour” in the aft of the plane which made some of the crew feel ill.
I've been an ICE agent for about a year now after a 12 year career in law enforcement, and prior to that did 4 years in the Navy. So I would love to do the training and help out with that.
I just hope they don't try to pin this on the controller who was on duty and move on without putting plans in place for some sort of structural change. Controllers are forced to work 60+ hour weeks and overnight shifts, and the controller in question was working both ground and air control simultaneously due to staffing shortages. If you listen to the ATC audio, he was handling finding a spot for a plane that aborted takeoff and declared an emergency, while calling emergency services for that plane, while coordinating multiple planes coming in to land, while also coordinating multiple planes trying to take off. With that kind of workload, an accident like this is an eventuality. Even after the fatal accident happened, he had to work for at least another hour before he could get relieved of his duty. Hopefully something will happen to fix this at some point rather than us collectively deciding that an accident or two per year is worth the cost savings of not keeping ATC properly staffed.
The NTSB - and aviation in general - as much as possible tries to avoid "pinning" issues on individuals. The purpose of an investigation isn't to ascribe blame, it's to try to understand what happened and how to prevent it from happening again, and prescribing "don't make mistakes" is not a realistic or useful method for preventing accidents from recurring.
Yes! But every news organization is leading with "I messed up." And the US President commented "They messed up", though it's unclear who that was in reference to.
Humans have a powerful need to affix blame and punish individuals. On the internet, you are forever the worst moment of your life.
We set air traffic controllers up to fail, and then when something goes wrong we torture them until they die, and then torture their memory after they die.
The current US President is the last person we should listen to when it comes to deciding anything important.
By using the role name rather than proper name, I'd hoped to spare HN from a tangent like this. My point doesn't rest on the nature of single individual, but instead applies to a human tendency. Politicians and press both play to the base impulses of a mass audience, unlike the NTSB. This is not the first time that a politician has scapegoated individuals when systemic failure occurs.
I actually can't remember or imagine another POTUS even getting to a level of specificity required to scapegoat an individual for something like this. The usual (and correct) answer is to say: "We don't know yet what happened, but there will be a full investigation and we will make the changes necessary to prevent it from happening again."
Pretty easy!
It doesn't serve us well to act like this administration is anything other than extremely aberrational.
Look, if you were to review my comment history you would have no doubt about where I stand on the current administration.
But scapegoating any single politician for the systemic problems of aviation is as unhelpful as scapegoating the controller for the crash at Laguardia.
I’ll scapegoat a single politician. Ronald Reagan - he owns 100% of the responsibility for the current state of things when he refused to negotiate better working conditions in 1981. The entire US is still feeling the aftermath.
This is not true. Aviation in the US has problems because of the tendency for safety regulators to do CYA when making decisions instead of adopting new technology.
Leaded gasoline? Illegal to use in the US - unless you're putting it into an old plane, where it's not likely legal to put unleaded in.
ATC? Done with old radar screens and physical cards.
Ground Control? Someone has to be standing in the tower with a pair of binoculars.
The US has an extremely safe aviation system, but the price for that safety has been technological stagnation. If I spend $70k on a small airplane, the best that'll get me is a 1975 Piper with a lawnmower engine and analog gauges. Replacing those with digital instruments will run ~$20k - the instruments themselves are only $7k, but the regulatory burden is quite pricey.
Reagan didn't do the US any favors when he treated ATC as disposable, but the truth is that the volume of flights has increased enormously and the job of ATC has gotten much harder while at the same time controller staffing has been screwed by budget fights in Congress and a couple years of one very misguided DEI policy.
The US needs to automate more of ATC. Human beings should be dedicated to emergencies, not issuing the exact same clearance 300 times a day.
It is absolutely true. I stated that Reagan is the reason that ATC are overworked and underpaid.
You proceeded to list a bunch of things that have absolutely nothing to do with ATC being overworked and underpaid.
"Automating more of ATC" would change absolutely nothing about the fact they're overworked and underpaid, there would just be fewer controllers with the same workload because they lost all ability to collectively bargain with Reagan.
Name an industry that has automated, and the end result was they kept the same number of employees, but paid them more and reduced their hours. Oh, and it can't be a unionized industry. I'll wait patiently wait for that list.
So public sector unions can do no wrong? Can never ask for too much? The public, and by extension, the politicians that they elect, is never allowed to question or refuse their demands?
Your belief is that no other politician in the next half century has had any responsibility for the state of ATC today? No politicians in that time could have increased their pay or increased recruiting and staffing numbers?
I didn’t see anyone scapegoating him for anything other than engaging in direct personal attribution which is counter to aviation safety culture, basic leadership principles, and minimum decorum standards ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
extremely aberrational
Is it still an aberration the second time 'round?
Yes
He lost the vote the first time. He lost to a corpse the second time he ran, it was like Weekend at Bernie's.
A superpower run by geriatrics.
Future historians are going to laugh at us- provided there will be any.
Agreed. Respect and decorum are gone with the most recent POTUS. It's not okay to ascribe this aviation incident to the ATC controller. However, it is fully okay to call the POTUS and staff out for attacking so many individuals, at such a deeply personal level, over issues that are clearly systematic and that have clearly gotten worse under current leadership.
Sure but most of his predecessors knew enough to not weigh in beyond regret for the tragedy and loss of life until after the investigators did their job.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who are legally obligated to listen to him for many important decisions.
Indeed. Similar accident (USAir 1493/Skywest 5569) shows that thinking exactly.[1] Was easy to pin on the controller, they went far beyond that in their analysis. Almost always impressed with the professionalism of those organizations. I sometimes wonder how software would look if we had such investigations for major incidents.
1: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c...
I hope it comes down to the NTSB recommending more controllers (or better conditions for controllers) to avoid task saturation, not just more process. It's incredible what a single controller is capable of doing, but for major areas like NYC, it's not enough.
Understand what happened and prevent it from happening again, so long as this can be done without expanding staffing, reducing OT, structural change, etc
No. Safety investigation agencies deliberately aren't regulators. The NTSB may decide that their recommendation is that every air passenger should be carrying a melon, and that results in a press release, a letter to the FAA saying that's what they recommend, that's all.
Deciding to change policies to effect the recommendation isn't their role. That's why you will so often see a safety investigatory body repeatedly recommend the same thing. The UK's RAIB (which is for Rail investigations) for example will often call out why a fatal accident they've investigated wouldn't have happened if the regulator had implemented some prior recommendation, either one they're slow walking or have rejected.
The investigators don't need to care about other factors. Are melons too expensive? Not their problem. Only unfriendly countries grow melons? Not their problem. They only need to care about recommending things that would prevent future harm which is their purpose.
> Deciding to change policies to effect the recommendation isn't their role.
And if it was the role of investigators to change policy, then there would be enormous pressure from industry to reach convenient conclusions, poisoning the investigation process.
NTSB's primary role is to investigate and they are darn good at it.
The NTSB also isn’t the organisation that makes any changes nor, as you suggest, assigns any penalties.
The NTSB only makes recommendations.
Hopefully some commercial professional pilots will comment on this thread, but if you go to sites where they normally hang out like:
https://www.airlinepilotforums.com
You will see many are terrified ( in commercial pilot terms...) of flying into La Guardia or JFK...
> https://www.airlinepilotforums.com/major/152572-aircraft-fir...
Just a quick read/speculation based on the linked forum post...
Short of insane visibility conditions that prevented them from seeing the plane coming, the firetruck operator seems to be the liable party (beyond the airport for understaffing controllers—this seems to be exacerbated by government cuts but that's still no excuse for having a solo controller at that busy of an airport, especially at night).
The controller in question seems to have caught their mistake quickly and reversed the order instead asking the firetruck to stop (but for some reason, this wasn't heard).
Is it common now to have solo operators running control towers?
"Liability" isn't really how we try to see things in aviation. While it's true that it's ultimately considered the responsibility of the truck/plane to visually confirm that crossing the runway is safe, refuse unsafe commands from ATC, and comply to the best of their ability when ATC says "stop" at the last second, we can't stop our analysis there if we want to prevent this from happening in the future, because unless things change someone will make this mistake again in the future. Telling people not to make mistakes isn't going to help at all; it's obvious, and no one wants to cause an accident. The error is just the last step in the process that led to the collision.
I don't think the ATC is at fault here. If they were put in a difficult situation and responsible for too much at once, I'd view that as a leadership bug, not their personal fault (or anything they should be held liable for). The weak links imo here are the firetruck driver and whoever that ATC reports to directly (i.e., there shouldn't have been an opportunity for this to happen—that's an executive failure, whether they want to take ownership or not).
The weak link is the system in place which puts so much work on so few staff.
The fire truck received the go ahead. They weigh 3x more than a normal firetruck. They're rushing to a different emergency. The plane is moving fast as hell. They can't just react instantaneously.
The ATC worker is clearly too stretched and such an incident was an inevitability. When they're shouting stop, they are no longer directly talking to the firetruck, which obscures the situation for everyone.
It is a terrible tragedy that will only be prevented with reform in staffing and safety procedures.
The NTSB’s role is to not to assign blame.
We aren’t in the aviation industry, and neither are we the NTSB.
Prosecutions and convictions do occur as a result of aviation incidents, pilots loose their jobs, pilots loose their licenses, ATC staff can be prohibited from ever working in the industry again.
We free to talk about all of those aspects here.
The controller was talking to Frontier plane when he first said stop, then said stopstopTruck1stopstopstop and it would be easy for there to be a gap in processing for the driver of truck 1 because the verbiage all flowed in the same stanza that was started when addressing the Frontier flight.
I am afraid the fire truck might have some level of responsibility, since it seems FAA ground vehicle guidance says:
AC No: 150/5210-20A - "Subject: Ground Vehicle Operations to include Taxiing or Towing an Aircraft on Airports"
https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...
“you must ensure that you look both ways down the runway to visually acquire aircraft landing or departing even if you have a clearance to cross.”
These trucks seem to have pretty good visibility from inside. Not sure if La Guardia model was the same: https://youtu.be/rfILwYo3sXc
Not arguing with the regulations, just pointing out that based on airport diagram[1], since the truck was crossing rwy on taxiway D, the CRJ was on the right approaching from behind. I have never been inside an airport firetruck, but I guess from the driver's seat the jet would be quite hard to see in this case.
[1]https://www.avherald.com/h?article=536bb98e
That is a good point but it seems instructions for ground vehicles seem to really stress this. For example this one: https://skybrary.aero/sites/default/files/bookshelf/1003.pdf
Says at pag 9:
"While driving on an aerodrome : Clear left, ahead, above and right
Scan the full length of the runway and the approaches for possible landing aircraft before entering or crossing any runway, even if you have received a clearance."
Visibility was bad (night and mist) too.
But if your truck has blind spots and vis is poor, you shouldn't be driving as fast if at all.
He was stopped until he received instructions to cross the runway from the person whose job it is to sit in a position with good visibility and tell people when they can cross runways. He wasn’t driving fast at all. The whole system is set up so that vehicles with blind spots (every large passenger jet) can safely move.
We can’t say that emergency vehicles should just stay in on dark and stormy nights.
>from the driver's seat the jet would be quite hard to see in this case.
..is what I was responding to.
>We can’t say that emergency vehicles should just stay in on dark and stormy nights.
This conclusion is flawed and doesn't apply to what I said.
If a truck can't see (conditions or not), then they shouldn't be on the same runway as takeoff/landing because...the consequences were severe despite the safeguards you mentioned, e.g. Not driving fast is relative and the "eyes" failed too initially.
“Vehicles with large blind spots don’t belong on the runway” is a completely untenable proposal.
Almost every airplane is bigger, blinder and slower than that truck. If it had been a plane cleared across the runway, this would have been so much worse.
Even if you want to exempt airplanes, it would require a complete rebuild of most major airports or using completely different emergency equipment. Every airport you have ever flown to commercially has ground vehicles crossing or operating on runways every day. It is simply not possible to operate a commercial airport without ground vehicles in aircraft movement areas, including runways.
The solution is not to spend billions on new trucks or access roads because of a single incident. It is to ensure that controllers, the people directly in charge of coordinating safe ground movement, have the mental bandwidth and tools to do their jobs. The fact that this was a truck and not an airplane is luck, making any discussions about truck cab visibility very much secondary. You have to go upstream of “trucks have blind spots” to truly prevent another of these incidents.
“Vehicles with large blind spots don’t belong on the runway” is a completely untenable proposal.
I never said this. This is very different to what I said.
This reveals you're having a different conversation.
You said: “If a truck can't see (conditions or not), then they shouldn't be on the same runway as takeoff/landing”
All of my arguments apply to this statement as well as they do to my paraphrase of the statement.
They still "apply to your paraphrase" which isn't accurate?
What?
It doesn't work like that unless you're having a different conversation.
You even earlier: “ But if your truck has blind spots and vis is poor, you shouldn't be driving as fast if at all”
How do you propose that a truck not driving “at all” manage to drive on the runway? Driving on the runway, (or anywhere) is a subset of driving “at all”. Logically I can conclude that since you think that the trucks should not be driving “at all” due to blind spots, that you also think that they should not be driving on runways because of blind spots.
My argument paraphrased you to highlight a specific situation that would arise as a result of what you argued and to point out the folly of just banning any vehicle with a blind spot from crossing the runway. By extension, that planes can’t cross the runway either (the difference between a fire truck and an airplane crossing the runway is that the plane is larger, with bigger blind spots, less maneuverable, fragile and filled with people).
The solution is not to ban vehicles with blind spots from crossing runways, but to provide tools and guidance for those vehicles to operate safely. You could, for example, provide them with a trained observer in an elevated place that can be responsible for saying whether it is ok to be on the runway. We could give the person coordinating movement in the elevated place tools like radar mapping the ground, or automated semaphore systems at runway crossings (I’m describing things that already exist). Using a system like that we could do things like operate in 0 visibility where the weather causes the blind spot to be anything past the windshield (which is something that happens at JFK for example).
>but I guess from the driver's seat the jet would be quite hard to see in this case.
They have mostly glass cabs for exactly that reason. Only thing that would block your view is a passenger in the right seat.
...and that passenger should also be actively looking around.
Every other truck in the column immediately stopped when the call was made. Truck 1 was the only one that didn't.
They were all, including truck 1, queued up at the stop line waiting for clearance to cross. Truck 1 received clearance to cross, he began crossing, then received instructions to stop after it was too late.
The rest of the emergency vehicles were stopped because they hadn’t been authorized. Truck 1 started moving because he had received specific instructions to do exactly what he was doing.
I take it you’re not a pilot, controller or someone who has ever worked an aviation radio?
FWIW the whole group received permission to cross. The instructions were to "Truck 1 and company", not just Truck 1
Thanks, I missed that.
"Truck 1 and company" were cleared to cross. A few seconds later, "truck 1" was instructed to stop.
Edit: Confirmed truck 1 was the one involved in the collision. Previous text: It is unclear which truck specifically was involved in the crash. In photos, the truck has the number 35 on it, not sure if that would preclude it from being identified as "truck 1" verbally.
Ah. I missed hearing that “and company” in the recording.
In any case, if they were cleared across the runway, and they were, it isn’t really on them. It doesn’t change the gist of the argument. The broader point is that it wasn’t that one truck was barreling around being reckless as implied by gp, it’s just that one truck made it out and the rest of the company had yet to start moving (whether because they saw the plane coming from their viewpoint farther back, or just hadn’t started moving yet, we will find out later). The entire company had stopped at the line, and when cleared across the lead truck was struck. Of course the rest were still stopped behind the line, there was a giant fire truck in their path moments before.
The instruction to stop is, to my pilots ear, irrelevant. Until an instruction is read back by the receiving party, it is worthless. It might not have been received, or received incorrectly. That’s the whole point of the readback, to ensure that the instruction was received correctly (notice how I missed the “and company”… a readback would have caught that). If there is not a readback, controllers are instructed to ask for one. On top of that, it was a panic instruction using non standard verbiage. If he was already past the line, the instruction to stop might have made it worse.
“I take it you haven’t ever worked with radio.. “. Seems like you haven’t a clue how any of this works. Doesn’t matter if they had radio clearance, the fire truck is responsible for ensuring runways is clear and not driving in front of plane.
I’m a certificated pilot in two countries, trained in this region, and own an airplane. I have a pretty good grasp how this works, but am willing to learn if you have citations besides the CFR pull quotes elsewhere in this thread.
All people (pilots included) are responsible for only following ATC instructions if it is safe/possible to do so. You aren’t supposed to land on a runway with other traffic on it, even if cleared. You aren’t supposed to cross a runway if there is a plane taking off or landing, even if cleared. You aren’t supposed to clear a vehicle onto a runway at the same time you cleared a plane to land (this one’s an assumption, I’m not a trained controller).
You are making the assumption that the truck did not check the runway, but keep in mind that it is a 30ish ton vehicle, and the plane was moving at 150 mph at touchdown, 100 mph at the time of impact. There very well may not have been a plane visible when the truck started moving. The truck might not have received the non-standard clearance revocation, or received it and tried to get off the runway by accelerating across, or received it and begun slowing in the path of the plane.
The truck driver could have prevented this, but they certainly aren’t the primary cause.
I very much doubt that you know the exact timing of the event. My guess is that you might have seen a video where some industrious editor put the ATC recordings over the leaked surveilance footage, but there is no way that is correctly synced.
With publicly available information we can sync it to within ~2 seconds. All trucks other than the first one were definitely in the process of stopping in between the first and second time ATC told them to stop (5 seconds apart).
> Is it common now to have solo operators running control towers?
At Class D airports it’s always been the norm. But KLGA is Class B.
I've seen the NTSB footage of the plane and helicopter crash in Washington. It is practically impossible to discern a landing plane over the lights of a big city at night. Next, the truck had been angled away from the plane approach, so it was coming from the right side (passenger side) and at back. There was zero chance that firetruck could have seen the plane in the seconds it covered hundreds of meters, flying at 200+ km/h. And also in that NTSB investigation there was a case of missed comms, when ATC recording clearly showed controller saying an important word, but it jot "jammed" in the process and there was silence at the receiving end instead of that word (in the middle of the transmission). Not saying it was a case here, but it is possible too.
Just like in that collision, it is possible there is no one single person to blame (apparently helicopter pilot was not outside of the legal corridor, despite the speculations), but it was a compounding error issue.
Truck was on a different frequency from the aircraft so they couldn’t even hear each others’ clearances.
Also first time ATC told the truck to stop it wasn’t too clear who the message was addressed to. It’s a bit hard to hear “Truck1” there, not clear who he wants to stop. The second time, one can argue by the time “stop” command was heard it might have been better to gun the engine. As the truck sort of slowed down in the middle of the runway.
> this seems to be exacerbated by government cuts
What government cuts? 2025 FAA air traffic budget was up around 7% from 2025
https://enotrans.org/article/senate-bill-oks-27-billion-faa-...
From the article:
> The crash has raised fears that operations at US airports are under extreme stress. Airports have been dealing with a shortage of air traffic controllers, exacerbated by brutal federal government personnel cuts by Donald Trump’s administration at the start of his second presidency.
Not my opinion, just reading from there.
So where there budget cuts or not? That was the claim. I have yet to find anything that suggests there were budget cuts, just vague mentions of "brutal federal government personnel cuts".
I'm just looking for: budget was X in <2026 and in 2026 it is Y, where X > Y
Analyze staffing, not budget. That gets more directly at workload.
You said budget cuts, not me.
Notably 2025 was also the year that Elon started firing people and shutting down things that were in the budget, as well as several shutdowns.
When I was young I took a tour of an air traffic control center near New York. By the end I knew it was not for me. Everyone looked stressed. Things have gotten so much worse.
This guy was doing at least 3 people's jobs even before the first emergency occurred.
Then it was an inevitable cascade failure situation. It was never his fault.
Management failed here. If its stupid but it works, its not stupid, is the old saying, but the reality I've seen is its still stupid but you got lucky. -Maxim 43
The luck finally ran out.
> Management failed here
And who was managing here? Do we dare point the finger at Congress and the POTUS for creating the conditions necessary for this to happen?
I hope the final report does point the finger. As far as politicians are concerned, accountability is for suckers.
> I just hope they don't try to pin this on the controller who was on duty and move on without putting plans in place for some sort of structural change.
I am reminded of the Uberlingen disaster:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_c...
I also drew parallels to the Uberlingen mid-aid collision, but for a different reason.
The mid-air collision occurred because the Russian air crew maneuvered contrary to their TCAS instruction (it commanded them to climb, the controller ordered them to descend). They were not trained that TCAS is the ultimate authority in this situation; it exists precisely because the controller has already failed in their separation duties, and if you have TCAS giving you a resolution advisory, your aircraft is no longer under ATC control and you must ignore any ATC instruction to the contrary. The other aircraft was correctly following its TCAS instruction (descending) because their crew was trained in this. Both planes descended and still hit each other.
In this case, KLGA has RWSLs (Runway Status Lights), including RELs (Runway Entrance Lights) on taxiways, that behave like traffic lights on roads. This too is completely automated and is the last-ditch resort for when a controller has already failed in their separation duties. This system processes transponder data of nearby aircraft and determines whether an aircraft is about to take off (is on the runway and accelerating) or land (is approaching the runway and descending). In either case the RELs go red automatically, and the controller cannot override this.
The driver of the ARFF probably [1] placed more emphasis on the controller's clearance to cross than the lights telling him to stay put, in exactly the same way that the Russian air crew placed more emphasis on the controller's instruction to descend than their TCAS instruction to climb, not realising that they were maneuvering contrary to the thing that exists specifically to prevent these accidents.
EDIT: I am not assigning blame to the controller here. They are human, and humans make mistakes. That's why these systems exist. Having one person handle an airport the size of KLGA is an accident waiting to happen.
[1] Obviously this is unknown at this point, and is something the NTSB will investigate. The system could have been down for maintenance for example.
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Los_Angeles_runway_collis... is more applicable.
In both cases, the controller's fate was grim. Peter Nielsen (Überlingen) was murdered by a relative of a crash victim. Robin Lee Wascher (LA), whose own parents had died in an earlier air crash, was crucified in the media and never worked as a controller again.
Both precedents are applicable, because the Laguardia controller is also going to be savaged.
Admiral Cloudberg has a great writeup about this. I instantly thought of LA when I saw the headlines about the LaGuardia collision.
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c...
Is it possible to automate the job of an ATC controller? At least partially? Or at least just as a sanity check on every human decision? Not saying I want human ATC controllers replaced, but if there’s a severe staff shortage, I feel like a computerized version is better than nothing at all.
In this specific incident, there was a system in place called Runway Entrance Lights [0] that does serve as an automated sanity check on controllers commands. The surveillance video that is circulating shows that the system was working and indicated that the runway was not safe to enter. It's not clear yet why the truck entered the runway anyway.
0: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
I wonder if they thought that since they were responding to an emergency, and they were given clearance to cross by ATC, that that would override normal procedures. Kind of like how emergency vehicles cross a red light all the time when responding to an emergency.
If they thought that, it was in error. Training SPECIFICALLY calls this out. The lights ALWAYS overrule the controller. Period.
It would be interesting to know whether that rule was onerous enough in practice that they had little choice but to break it in order to do their jobs effectively. They were responding to an emergency, seconds count, and they believed they had clearance from the controller.
> The surveillance video that is circulating shows that the system was working and indicated that the runway was not safe to enter.
A citation, please? The only video that I know of is [1].
[2] is my best mock up of the only video I have. I'm am not an expert, but my best read of that is that the RWSL is maybe? green to the taxiway¹ traffic, so, to me, the actual status of the RWSL at the time of the incident is "unknown"; that seems like something I should wait for the NTSB report, or at least someone with expert knowledge on. But your claims doesn't jive with the evidence I have, so that's what makes me ask for a citation.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRl7Vr87ym8&t=29
[2]: https://imgur.com/a/RVL28AV
¹but I think there are a number of problems with my own interpretation: I could be wrong about which lights are which; I am using the near-side lights, not the lights on the side the truck is entering from, and assuming them to be symmetrical (though what little I can see of the far side does seem to align with the near side); some of the lights I think are RWSLs & not RGLs look downright yellow, but that could be a property of the low quality of the video; there's the rather large problem of the plane on the runway that must then be explained.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/1s1mgc...
Sorry for the late reply, and sorry for linking to reddit, but it was the first place I could find the right video. I saw this video linked at least a dozen times in the hours following the incident. I believe the clip you linked to is from the same video, but with the beginning cut off.
At approximately 1.5 seconds in my link, you can see one set of lights perpendicular to the runway turn off. I admit the the lighting/colors are not as crisp as I would like, but the lights that turn off are positionally consistent with the Runway Entrance Lights and the time at which they turn off (approximately 2 seconds before the plane enters the intersection) is also consistent with the operation of the Runway Entrance Lights system.
Furthermore, if the system was not operational it should have been NOTAMed as such, and I can find no such NOTAM so my default position is that the system was operational.
Why cross a runway at all? Can they not use taxiways and aprons to get there?
The fire station was located on the opposite side of runway 4 from the United plane. To avoid crossing the runway would mean having to travel a few extra miles around the thresholds (I assume).
I guess they could have found a route that wouldn't conflict with landing aircraft, but I doubt that's a practical option most of the time.
You sometimes have end around taxiways that are at one end of the runway and can be used when active. But that could be a massive diversion.
I know that Heathrow have multiple fire stations and rendezvous points for emergency services so that fire service can attend even when one runaway is closed to crossing. This could be needed to allow continued operations following a crash. It allows them to accept emergency landings more easily whilst maintaining emergency service to another active runway.
Plotting a course on Google Maps, I think this would add ~1.4 mi if you go around to get to the other side from where they were.
The REILs are part of ARFF training. Pilot training on it is also clear. The system is automated. It plots the direction and speed of anything approaching the runway and predicts a conflict. If the REILs are red it is HIGHLY likely there is a conflict that is missed by human error and you should not proceed without confirming. Don't just confirm cleared to cross, explicitly tell the controller "XYZ tower we have red runway entrance lights. Please confirm runway XX is clear".
The system is smart enough that if you get red bars to cross for an airplane departing once it passes your position the red clears because it knows the airplane is already past you. It is not dumb - it was deliberately designed to minimize false positives so everyone would trust it otherwise they might ignore it when it really counts. (AFAIK it very accurate in fact so the firetrucks weren't crossing because they distrusted the red lights).
This is just like all aviation incidents and indeed most incidents of any kind: the holes in the swiss cheese lined up.
The emergency aircraft couldn't find a free gate, creating a massive distraction for ATC, airport, et al. This is probably the primary domino that started the sequence. Had a gate been free this incident would not have happened. One big hole lined up.
Normally the aircraft would visually see the truck or the truck would visually see the airplane. But it was dark and rainy. Another hole lined up.
Everyone involved was rushing because noise abatement requires the airport to close at a certain hour. Thus everyone wanted to take-off or land before that shutdown. Another hole.
Normally the controller wouldn't issue the clearance to cross or their supervisor monitoring behind them would notice the error and override. But the controller and/or supervisor were distracted by the emergency. Another hole lined up.
The controller realized the error and issued a stop command but the fire truck proceeded anyway; they may or may not have heard the transmission. Another hole lined up.
Then someone else decided to jump on frequency during this busy time (we don't know who just yet) which may have prevented the controller's stop and/or go-around commands from being heard (another hole lined up).
The ARFF crew did not obey the REILs, accepting the clearance. Perhaps they thought the red lights were due to aircraft on short final and they still had time to cross? Perhaps it was some other misunderstanding of how that system works. Another hole lines up.
And the Air Canada jet was not paying attention to the chaos on frequency. There's a reason runway crossings are typically done on tower frequency: so aircraft can hear what is going on. But it was late at night and their brains probably didn't process what was happening. Or they were too close to touching down to have the bandwidth. Another hole lined up.
> the holes in the swiss cheese lined up.
I totally agree with you on that.
> The emergency aircraft couldn't find a free gate, creating a massive distraction for ATC, airport, et al.
Yes. And I want to add one more thing to this: the airplane with the "odour" issue was kinda ambivalent about the danger. They deemed it dangerous enough to declare an emergency, and request a gate then later ask for airstairs but not dangerous enough to pop the slides and just evacuate right there and then. I'm not saying this is wrong. Obviously they were evaluating the situation as new information was coming in. But it increased the workload of the ATC. They were trying to find a gate, and etc. If it was a clearer "mayday mayday mayday, aft cabin fire, we are evacuating" that might have been paradoxically less "work" for the ATC. Or at least more of a "practiced" scenario.
> Perhaps it was some other misunderstanding of how that system works.
Yeah. That's a big one. Total speculation but maybe they thought the airplane with the "odour" issue was keeping it red?
A great deal of ATC relies on automation, such as systems like ASDE-X, which is used at LGA. ASDE-X uses radar and vehicle transponders (among other things) to detect collision hazards on the ground. Unfortunately ASDE-X only works if every vehicle has a transponder.
The truck involved in the collision did not have one. https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3mht7m2f3rc2...
No, a lot of it is human - asking for things, getting things.
NTSB's M.O. has always been that there is never just one cause. A human mistake that costs lives is never that simple. There is a system that trained the person, a set of incentives that put the person into that place, a set of safeguards that should have existed to prevent the mistake from causing life loss, and a regulatory framework to occasionally verify all of the above. I would expect that "the controller made a mistake" would be ~one paragraph in a 100-page report.
Exactly. In the field of accident analysis and prevention the "swiss cheese model"[1] is very popular for this reason. It acknowledges that every layer of the system will have holes, and that ideally every layer when stacked up provides complete coverage. If something bad happens that means that holes every layer had to have aligned and the whole stack bears some responsibility for the outcome.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
I suspect someone is literally asking the idiotic question if they can just replace our air traffic controllers with an AI.
ATC are under contract to not be able to quit, basically high stress slavery and the gov't put the screws to them. The only thing that will fix this is the rich can't fly their private jets
> ATC are under contract to not be able to quit, basically high stress slavery...
Source? Because that isn't true; they can quit like any other civilian government job.
> ...and the gov't put the screws to them.
That part is true though.
What structural change would permit a worker to take initiative and say "Hey, these working conditions are wrong/inadequate and I will not safely do my job today unless proper changes are made", without risk of getting fired by higher-ups?
Empowering workers to make safety-critical meta-decisions does not seem to be a feature of actually-existing capitalism.
What you're describing is already well known in the aviation industry. Promotion of a positive safety culture is a key element if the Safety Management System (SMS) framework
https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/sms https://www.faa.gov/media/94731
If a tree knows something but still falls then did it really know anything?
SMS is mandated by the FAA
> What structural change would permit a worker to take initiative and say "Hey, these working conditions are wrong/inadequate and I will not safely do my job today unless proper changes are made", without risk of getting fired by higher-ups?
Well, what you are describing is a strike, and it is currently illegal for ATC to strike, so in theory one possible structural change would be to make it legal for the workers to do what you're describing.
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The FAA's problems are systemic and structural. They've existed long, long before the 2024 election.
It certainly didn't help.[1]
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-doges-cutbacks-at-the-...
the headline literally says "could", not that it did. can you point to evidence that DOGE cutbacks did negatively affect aviation safety, particularly with regards to ATCs?
Yes, but the problems have been driven by the relentless deregulation of critical industries and infrastructure primarily driven by a specific political bloc. In the next US election, we should vote for candidates that promise systemic change and government overhaul, not further deregulation and handouts to corporations.
Mostly due to blind faith in austerity and the market, by certain groups.
They got markedly worse after 2024. No need to minimize the damage the current administration is doing to the institutions of the country.
Can you elaborate on what change you would like to occur?
I have voted based on getting particular people nominated within a federal agency, requires the President to pick someone who will 100% be from their party, and a Senate committee that will confirm them
people tend to think "I'm voting against my best interests" without knowing that the agency control was my best interest as it will most likely continue shaping an industry far beyond any particular administration
I could see that happening again with your abstract, vague, and ambiguous idea. Just say what you mean specifically, use your words, so I know if it's something that could steer my vote or not
You had two options and one was clearly far worse than the other. This nuanced-excuse-making and “the democrats also occasionally do things I don’t like” is lazy. Take responsibility for letting the mob take over - even if it was just by inaction.
I didn’t turn 18 in the last several years
So the odds I’m talking about the current administration are low
I wrote that I have voted for an agency appointment before, and the person I replied to also is suggesting to do that again
yes, only democrats use the meme “voting against their best interest”, sometimes this voting pattern includes or excludes them
Very doubtful whatever agency you can conjour up as an excuse will be more impactful than the country wide changed induced by the overall administration
cute that you think impact is the goal
vote in your local elections if the feds aren't involved the way you wish
It bothers me that everyone is laser focused on poor ATC staffing and working conditions (which is very valid, don't get me wrong). I think airport capacity should be fixed depending on ATC staffing. We need to have less air travel.
The way I think about it is this: substandard ATC staffing is just as bad as lacking jetways or damaged runways. When the airport can't land planes because of physical capacity constraints, flights get cancelled or delayed (literally happening today at LGA, flights are getting canceled because they're down one runway). The carriers need to eat the costs of forcing too much demand on ATCs.
> The carriers need to eat the costs of forcing too much demand on ATCs.
Running ATC (and limiting flights if necessary) seems like the job of the government to me.
Why put this on the carriers?
Put the costs on the carriers, not hand the job over to them.
You are correct. Robustness requires a system that is working within it's tolerance margin, and stressing that inevitably leads to failure. A fault-tolerant system in this case would require a large amount of redundant humans. Unfortunately, the capitalist mindset prevents accepting any amount of "waste" as tolerable, which makes a robust system impossible to implement over time. Every system touched by a capitalist optimizer will eventually fail.
The idea that waste must be reduced is killing society, and this mindset must be addressed first before any other safety-critical system can be made reliable again.
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LaGuardia did have a fully staffed ATC, and there's zero evidence this controller was overworked. You seem to be prematurely ascribing cause when nothing has been investigated yet.
The evidence that this controller was overworked is that practically all controllers in the US at present are overworked. As such, that should be treated as the null hypothesis, and it would require substantial evidence to show that he isn't overworked.
Couldn’t we just… wait to see what FAA says before coming up with our own (entirely speculative) theories?
NTSB is the relevant institution, not FAA.
Can we trust the FAA's conclusion?
Its previous head had a term that didn't expire until 2028 but he resigned after pressure from Elon Musk (who didn't like that he got fined), now a Trump-friendly head has been installed. What, realistically, would be the consequences if he lied? Likely none. Government officials lying on record is an every day occurrence these days.
True! Assumptions and speculation are always better.
I’m glad we’ve made our conclusions up front before the report has even come out.
That saves me a lot of reading!
Come on, this is silly. The fact that air traffic controllers are overworked is neither an assumption nor speculation. It is very widely documented.
The only thing we know so far is from two minutes of ATC audio.
That’s literally it. Anything else is speculation and extrapolation.
But don’t let that stop you if you already know what caused the tragedy.
It does not at all mean that this controller was overworked when this crash happened; that would be failed reasoning and misuse of evidence. It just raises the question, which should be looked at.
It's scary that so many don't seem to know the difference. This is how misinformation starts and spreads.
You're 100% right, a "Trump-friendly" administrator has been "installed" so we can't trust the FAA's conclusions. The last guy quit so this guy is definitely going to lie.
I'd pay to watch someone say this in a court of law...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_person
The concept most certainly exists.
> LaGuardia did have a fully staffed ATC
According to whom? Management, or controllers?
Certainly does not seem like controllers agree:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/
There's a mountain of evidence. No single controller should ever be running tower and ground at an airport like LGA.
The parent post was unjustly flagged for no other reason than facts make overly emotional people here squirm with anger. Pathetic and lame.
This is worthy of losing flagging privileges IMO.
The Secretary of Transportation said on record at the first press conference that reports this guy was working alone in the tower are INACCURATE. The actual number is the responsibility of the NTSB to disclose.
95% of this discussion is people blowing smoke out of their ass as per usual.
From VAS Aviation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY, or possibly in the comments, it was noted that there were 2 people on - one in the tower, one elsewhere in charge of approach. So perhaps, it's innacurate because he was working "with" the person on approach, but still accurate to what we would all call "working alone"?
Exactly how many people do the self-appointed experts of HackerNews feel should be working ATC at an airport with only two intersecting runways?
10? 30? One per aircraft?
How do you suppose all these people coordinate their activities?
It used to be that there was always a supervising controller on duty, who kind of rotated around each active controller, acted as backup for breaks, etc. for this class of airport - from my layman reading at least. This still seems to be the paper requirement.
So the minimum here would be 3 controllers given that nights setup. One for approach/ground, one for departure. Obviously you can argue more would be appropriate to segregate duties further, but it was a night shift headed into airport shutdown.
There seems to have been two working. The supervising controller double booked as a primary controller for departure at the time of incident. The fact the incident controller wasn’t immediately relieved of duty and had to spend 30 minutes shutting the airport down himself seems to match this explanation.
From what I’ve read on the matter for this tower not having a supervising controller was rather normalized - which is outside of SOP and something you need to report to management every time it happens. For this incident there was one - but sounds like one in name only. Once normalization of deviance happens, working in a way where two controllers that on paper should be sharing duties - but in practice are splitting them - seems exactly how I’d expect things to go.
But this is all speculation at this point of course. NTSB report will be interesting.
Either way - it has been clear for decades ATC needs both a massive surge in the staffing pipeline as well as a legitimate modernization program competently implemented. It’s certainly not a problem that started or remained in any single administration. Even if one or another had been worse, others sure as hell haven’t done much at all to fix the situation.
Many airports have intersecting runways to account for changing wind directions.
Are you talking about a two strip airfield on a cattle station in the Northern Territory with once a month traffic, or something else?
Your "gotcha" class question isn't especially well formed.
Everyone is stomping their feet saying the answer should be more than the number which has not yet been disclosed, so we don't know, but yet everyone also refuses to provide a definite number.
So tell me, for an airport that only has two runways which intersect, at LGA's volume, what is the correct number of controllers that should be working that field?
This also assumes the FAA hasn't already done this math and the gaming-chair experts know more than the FAA (which they don't).
In my direct 20 year experience working millions of line kilometres of air survey, zero or one controllers works out just fine.
Again, you haven't sufficiently qualified your questions - it's not about the number of runways.
EDIT: I see you updated your response and added in a nod to traffic volume - that's a good start.
Other factors in this non linear multi factor equation are ... ?
If a member of this administration said he wasn’t working alone, that’s solid evidence he was.
The evidence that he was overworked seems pretty damned obvious. He forgot about an entire airplane and put a fire truck in its path. The evidence of overwork is strewn all around LGA.
> If a member of this administration said he wasn’t working alone, that’s solid evidence he was.
This is deranged. Seek help.
What's deranged about treating information from notorious liars as evidence against whatever they say?
How do you know it was due to staffing shortages? It is common at LGA for one controller to be handling Tower and Ground late at night.
You are describing a staffing shortage.
"Staffing shortage" doesn't mean "you can fit more people in the tower."
You can't think of any scenario having one controller makes sense?
In general, I can. In LaGuardia? Aside from right after 9/11 and during COVID-19 when almost all commercial travel stopped, I cannot.
I don't think people saying this stuff quite understand how busy LGA is even at night. I'd even go as far as to say that three minimum on duty with two in the tower at all times (for a ground/air split), would be the bare minimum for any hour or situation at LGA.
It does quiet down eventually. There's no scheduled departures 22:55-5:45 and only a handful of arrivals 23:59-6:45.
However, arrivals stay pretty heavy right up until 23:59 even on schedule and if you've got a lot of delayed flights (not exactly uncommon at LGA) - you may still have a lot of departures going out in the 23:00 hour.
I would not be surprised to learn that they're staffed to an appropriate level for what the schedule says is supposed to be operating at that time, but a very inadequate level for what actually winds up operating at that time on many days.
Initial analysis suggests they were running about 75% of full capacity in flight ops in the 15min prior to the accident. I doubt they were staffed to 75% of the daytime peak.
When the airport is closed, in case there was an emergency that needed to reroute. One person on then makes sense?
La Guardia appears to handle 400 flights a day, 22 an hour. I see 6 moving planes right now (https://www.flightradar24.com/airport/lga); hopefully they have more than one person on?
400 flights a day is 16-17 per hour and those are going to be mostly during the day. As someone else points out there is a ~6 hour stretch overnight with no scheduled departures. That's somewhat common even at large hubs.
I don't want to blow your mind but if the airport closes there aren't going to be any controllers in the tower.
You can't think of any scenario having one controller makes sense?
At one of the nation's busiest airports? Where there are two intersecting runways, both potentially with departing and arriving aircraft? Nope.
But, sure, a single-runway regional airport can probably get by with a single controller.
Is he? I can see the number of hours worked as evidence of a shortage, but prima facie it is not obvious that a single controller handling both ground and air is evidence of a 'shortage' if it is routinely considered feasible in the industry. It could just be an efficiency choice for low-traffic times. Based on some googling since I'm not an expert it seems this is called 'position combining' in the US and is pretty routine across the world. Therefore, if this is a problem the primary cause cannot be US policy because non-US airports also do this thing.
Here it's being done at SFO or so it seems: https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?FileExtension=...
While searching I did find this other document where a GC (LC appears to be Local Control for local air traffic and GC is ground control) controller complains about combining due to short-staffing https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=19837915&Fi...
Well, it'll be an interesting report from the NTSB at least.
An obvious issue is going to be that while it's supposed to be a lower-traffic time, if you've had delays cascading down the day - it may not be in reality. If the staffing doesn't adjust for delays shifting the time of flights, it would probably often leave you with an overworked controller.
Looking at the normal schedules - if all is on schedule there'd be no departures in the 23:00 hour but you'd still have the arrivals side running pretty heavily. However, once you factor in things not being on schedule, as they evidently were not on that night, you get:
----------
The 15min before the accident had 14 flight operations (per Juan Browne/blancolirio going through the ADSB playback). And that's in marginal weather and at night, which makes things more complicated.
That is 75% of the official maximum capacity of the airport - during the main part of the day where there's government-imposed caps on flights, it's capped at 74 operations per hour or about 18.5 per 15min.
As such, it seems apparent that you would need just as much staffing (or at least 75% as much) at that time to safely handle the traffic volume that was occurring that night as you did in the main part of the day.
Unless the normal staffing here was just 2 people, it seems clear that 1 is inadequate.
"...routinely considered feasible..."
What we are seeing here is the normalization of deviance.
And therein lies the problem. Clearly, having one overworked controller running a combined tower is not safe nor sustainable.
It seems like a critical enough role that you probably want two people there in case one has a medical emergency anyway. Even if it's not that busy.
I believe other areas can assist when something like that happens.
Planes landing at a rate of one every 30-40 minutes isn't exactly "overworked."
I don’t have time to check flight logs but I personally landed at LGA coming from MDW on Sunday. And I also know people who got diverted within the hour coming back to LGA that night. 30-40 minutes doesn’t seem accurate. That aside, if you’ve ever done operational staffing, you’d know that you should probably have at least one redundancy. When there is any chance of emergency or two events happening simultaneously, you should have more than one person.
One last meta point. We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and the highest air travel prices (some part is a function of longer distances I know). We should expect that we have ample coverage, if not over-coverage, at all times for one of our major metropolitan airports. Pay them.
Almost every night there are 6-7 hours with zero or near-zero scheduled departures and very few scheduled arrivals.
The controller shortage has nothing to do with pay, controllers make a lot of money.
My point was more that when this occurred, it wasn’t dead.
Ten hours a day, six days a week, and forced resignation at fifty six. I doubt it pays good enough with the amount of burnout a job like that brings.
12am-5am is very quiet, at about 1 per hour. But the accident happened during the 10pm-12am time slot, which is not as busy as other times of day, but can still have workload spikes as evidenced by this situation.
ATC should never work alone at any of the "Core 30" airports. https://www.aspm.faa.gov/aspmhelp/index/Core_30.html
In this case there were two arrivals within 4 minutes of each other and two departures, in addition to the emergency plane that had just aborted takeoff.
Which is a completely reasonable amount of traffic for one controller to handle. This wasn't the controller's fault. The firetruck received a clearance, had that clearance revoked, and either didn't hear the revocation or ignored it.
If you have ever spent time listening to LiveATC you will realize that like everyone, "tunnel ear" is a real thing - if United 1002 has received the clearance/instructions they expect, read them back, and are proceeding it can be moderately difficult to get their attention again, even with perfect verbiage.
The controller was not guilty of malfeasance, but clearing the trucks onto the runway with an airliner on short final was a mistake, no matter whatever else one could say about it.
What is the contingency/continuity plan if the single controller becomes incapacitated while on duty with no warning to pilots?
Same as if the radios stopped working or otherwise communication fails. Execute the planned procedures (which vary).
Often Approach will take over the "tower" and operate in crippled mode (no clearances to cross active runways, you must go down to the end kind of thing).
Some airports are uncontrolled at various times and would revert to that. Some airlines would require the pilot execute a missed approach and deviate to a towered airport, others may allow them to land.
That seems mad, given the volume of traffic they're working - even without emergencies. My local GA field is single controller, and that's VFR, grass runways, averages 40-50 movements/day.
What you just described is a long term staffing shortage.
Maybe there should be more than one
Maybe. Lets see what the NTSB recommendations say.
However despite the downvotes I still haven't seen evidence that they were running understaffed at that moment.
What I do know is that the developing emergency on the tarmac due to an apparently hazardous smell in another plane is likely the cause of the confusion that led to this incident. That's a trigger that could have been exacerbated by fatigue but we don't have any evidence of that yet.
> I still haven't seen evidence that they were running understaffed at that moment.
I think the disagreement you see is based on the definition of what "understaffed" means. Having one ATC to do ground and air control simultaneously seems like an under-staffing situation to begin with, regardless of whether it's a common practice.
There is also the angle of: even if there is an appropriate amount of controllers in the tower at a given time, how they do it can also hint at the issue. Being an ATC is a taxing job, mandatory overtime and 60 hours work weeks screams understaffing to me.
It is possible for ATC to be understaffed as a profession, LGA to be understaffed as an airport, individual controllers to be overworked, and for it to be 100% reasonable to have a single controller at LGA in the middle of the night.
Its weird that there strict laws that limit pilot hours to under 40 hours a week but no laws that restrict number of hours ATC works.
> Having one ATC to do ground and air control simultaneously seems like an under-staffing situation to begin with
Do we have evidence that one controller did all ground and air? The only evidence I've seen was the NY Times said that, according to a source, two controllers were working and two more were in the building.
In situations like this there is as lot of disinformation. The best thing to do is not add to it - a pile of bad information is not improved by piling more on. The best thing is to patiently find reliable info and stick to it.
That one controller was handling both ground and air is still a bit of a tell that there was some short-handedness afoot, though, by my eye.
> The best thing is to patiently find reliable info and stick to it.
No disagreement here
> That one controller was handling both ground and air ...
Why do you (or why does anyone) think that? My point in the GP was, I have yet to see evidence that there was only one controller, and I have seen evidence that there were two.
Because in the ATC recording you hear him directing both
I get it now. That's of interest, definitely, but I wouldn't conclude it was universally true - that the one controller did both for everyone.
You can listen to the ATC recordings before and after the accident.
Does someone say there is only one controller working? Just because that particular recording has only one controller doesn't mean nobody else is working.
You can hear him directing ground and air traffic.
SPOF still applies here. You don't need evidence of fatigue or anything. You have only 1 of anything, you run the risk of ending up having nothing.
At your job how many people are working at any given time and how many lives are you responsible for at any given moment?
"The system worked yesterday, so it should have worked forever."
Some people here coded the buttons that sometimes don't work when you check in for your flight. That makes them aviation experts. How dare you question wild assumptions.
> It is common at LGA for one controller to be handling Tower and Ground late at night.
What happens when they need the bathroom, or have some kind of medical problem? If it's really a common case for one controller to handle things, the system itself needs to be fundamentally rethought.
There are other people there, but the person on the radio is doing both.
> the controller in question was working both ground and air control simultaneously due to staffing shortages
How many planes land at LGA in the middle the night?
One controller overnight is completely reasonable.
Approximately one per minute in the 15 minute span proceeding this crash, including one that had an emergency takeoff rejection and was being maneuvered along with the emergency support vehicles that were being sent to attend to it
>> One controller overnight is completely reasonable
So if said controller has a medical episode?
That risk is managed through medical certification. The real problem with understaffing is that one person can't handle all that work.
"Funny" enough if this controller had had a medical emergency (or just bad sushi) and been off the radios, this wouldn't have happened because the fire truck would not have received clearance to cross the runway and wouldn't have. Or at least would have crossed like the airport was uncontrolled, been much more careful and announced itself, and likely have seen the landing aircraft.
And if an aircraft needs to land due to an emergency? It’s amazing things work as well as they do, the system relies on only one thing going wrong at a time. This accident was an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time.
Every accident is an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time.[0]
I'm going to pretend to know exactly what would happen in that precise scenario but I'm confident most commercial pilots get enough training to be able to handle it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
>> Every accident is an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time.
You are defeating your own argument :-) Its exactly because every accident is an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time...that you need...multiple layers of control and safety to catch it through each hole of the cheese.
Like...another controller?
One of the things you learn as a pilot is how to recognize that you need to go into emergency mode if you will. Call it high-alert if you want.
You need to recognize when something is out of the ordinary and treat it as an emergency (perhaps not a literal pan-pan/mayday emergency) sooner rather than later, and do things that may end up to have been unnecessary (like executing a go-around because emergency vehicles were on the move).
One controller on two frequencies is another example - that works fine in normal situations, but during an emergency response, perhaps the channels should be mixed; giving the pilots in the air a chance to hear the incorrect clearance onto their runway.
After all, an active runway is really more of an "air" control thing than a ground one.
An empty tower at La Guardia with a bunch of airplanes in the air not getting a reply to their calls is Die Hard 2 stuff. Spare me the Pete Hegseth school of ATC...
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The GP is literally about a lone controller in the tower having a medical episode and what would happen after that.
The pilots would execute untowered approach procedures, a small airport with little to no traffic and VFR flight you may self-announce on frequency, a larger airport you go back to approach, etc.
Each of those flights should have an alternate and be prepared (have enough fuel) to divert. If there is a fuel emergency then self-announcing is likely appropriate as the plane is coming down anyway, but that is multiple things going wrong.
A big part of it is what category of airport it is, and plane. General aviation almost always goes to self-announce (which includes some business jets perhaps, they often land at untowered airports) but not category 135 air travel or whatever it is.
I can’t find a way to read this other than
“If we remove regulation and safety controls, things will be safer because everyone will be more careful.”
You should try harder, because I'm not making any comment on regulation whatsoever. There are procedures that every controller and pilot knows for how to handle loss of radio contact.
Am I misunderstanding the implication in your comment that things would have been safer had there been no ATC at all?
Because the parties involved would be more careful if there were no ATC?
And we know how well that works: https://youtu.be/AWM0l8_F_X0?t=411
Can a single human being reliably and robustly maintain a safety-critical system alone under any circumstances, ever?
Ever?
I design and conduct space missions, and I'm an experienced professional pilot. The answer to your question is "never."
Any system that requires perfect performance from any one human will fail.
There are millions of people who are self employed in an industry where they could be maimed or killed if they screw up who manage to make it to retirement.
I think the better question is how you get a system in which people are only responsible for any one facet to get the same performance out of people that a painter can get out of himself when he's setting up his own ladder that he personally has to climb on.
The goal should always be to reduce the human dependency - where reasonable which is where all the argument is, because of the cost/benefit analysis.
Mandatory scaffolding for roofing contractors would save some amount of deaths/injuries (and the related expenses) but add expenses to each job.
Some roofing firms refuse to operate without scaffolding; you pay for it or you find someone else.
I don't think the GPs point is about personal safety of workers, but rather critical safety systems that rely on one person with no backups. Like an ATC tower for a busy airport staffed by a single person on an overnight shift.
A painter who does a bad job setting up a ladder is going to have a bad time, a lone ATC operator having a heart attack potentially puts multiple large aircraft full of people in danger...
Normally? Zero. LGA has a curfew from midnight to six AM, April 5-December 31.
In practice? It depends. Delays have a tendency to cascade in the air travel system and the Port Authority can curtail or cancel the curfew at their discretion. How frequently do exceptions to normal ops have to happen for it to be unreasonable to use "normal ops traffic" as a justification for scheduling a single controller? Ultimately, controllers have to control the traffic that they get, not the traffic that they want/expect to get, and a system that is overly optimized becomes brittle and unable to deal with exceptions to the norm.
Looking at the things he needs to juggle at the same time, is it really reasonable? Any standard we are referring here? Sure such cases are rare but that's why we have redundancies for critical positions.
> One controller overnight is completely reasonable.
How many fatal accidents are reasonable in your opinion?
> One controller overnight is completely reasonable.
Do you really think it's appropriate to have zero margin for handling unusually high ATC workloads? Because we just saw what happens when you have zero margin for handling unusually high ATC workloads: people start dying.
"... we have an odor on the plane as well here at this time. We are going to be going back to the gate, request fire as well." - United pilot
"2384, it is oder like a smoke odor ...like from fire?" - Control
"No, it was a weird odor. I don't know exactly how to describe it. But yeah... we can't get a hold of anyone at the ops for a gate assignment." - United pilot
"Ground, United 2384 is declaring an emergency. The flight attendants in the back are feeling ill because of the odor. We will need to go into an available gate at this time." - United pilot
"... the fire trucks are over there. They're going to bring a stair truck just in case you guys do want to evacuate. Let me know if you do." - Control
"Copy, yeah, we prefer to wait on a gate, but I mean, again, we only got so much time here because there's still a bit of odor in the back of the airplane." - United pilot
"646, number two, clear to land 4." - Control
"Truck one and company, cross four Delta." - Control
"Truck one and company, crossing four at Delta." - Truck 1
"Stop, stop, stop, stop, Truck 1. Stop,stop, stop. Stop, Truck 1, Stop." - Control
"That was - that wasn't good to watch." - Frontier pilot
"Yeah, I know. I was here. I tried to reach out to [inaudible]. We were dealing with an emergency earlier... um, I messed up." - Control
"No, man, you did the best you could." -Frontier pilot
Feel bad for the ATC officer. I hope they can find it in them to forgive themselves.
There was a single traffic controller handling the entire airport. This was bound to happen and will keep happening unless things change. It's absurd that the US hasn't been able to fix its ATC shortage in decades.
Currently over 41% of facilities are reliant on mandatory overtime, with controllers frequently working 60-hour weeks with only four days off per month.
This. Go look at the atc subreddit, controllers have been begging for help for ages. This isn't one guy's fault.
>This isn't one guy's fault.
Counterpoint. It's Regen's fault. He's the guy who decided that a high priority of the government was making sure air traffic controllers had no power to fight back against being horrifically overworked (because unions are evil you see)
One thing people forget is that the key complaints PATCO's members had were:
Reagan went to war with the union instead of addressing these things.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...
Wasn't it Congress who passed 5 U.S.C. § 7311. which says a person may not “accept or hold” a federal job if they “participate in a strike” against the U.S. government.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311
originally passed as
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=2023&num=0&req=g...
So arguably if Reagan had not fired them he would be failing to uphold the laws of the United States.
They were striking for less outdated tools, improving staffing levels, and other safety improvements. The solution was to give them the things they wanted.
Pretty much everything broken in the USA stems directly from Reagen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g95fiZCzjlo
I’m not saying he didn’t ignore a real problem - but it’s been 45 years since the 1981 airline strike. Surely the blame ought to be spread around our incompetent Federal government.
This is mostly nonsense, by the way. While Reagan won his presidential elections by a huge margin, he never had the House of Representatives on his side, only the Senate. So it's not like he had a unique position to make changes that hasn't happened since. In fact, any government since then could have undone any or all of these "everything broken in the USA" things. But they didn't. Probably because people like, oh, the viewers of this video, will keep blaming a dead president instead of them. Hah! It's beautiful in a way...
You don't need a union to have effective management. It should also be their incentive not to cause people's death by overworking employees. Which is also dumb because it costs more to overwork then hire appropriately with overtime laws... cops exploit this all the time to steal money from taxpayers. (The ones in Seattle only get caught when they accidently charge over 24 hours of overtime in a day)
Union rules that say only a particular classification of employee is allowed to pick up a small package from a loading dock and move it twenty feet are also bad.
The blame can go to the top, for not managing correctly.
> It should also be their incentive
You can't just proclaim what incentives should be. We do have a mechanism for changing the incentives of management though: it's called unions.
If it was a traveler's union, maybe. Cop unions don't result in better outcomes for the general public, and there's no reason a controller's union won't end up just boosting pay and having a rubber room for hacks (referencing NYC schools paying teachers to not work because they're either predators or terrible at teaching, but being unable to fire them).
Try looking outside the US to see how unions work without being crushed by 100 years of anti union legislation. Also police unions are a joke.
A traveler's union? So there is no solution you see?
There have been six presidents who could have addressed this since Reagan. Every one of them shoulders some of the responsibility.
Yes, they should all have taken actions. But also, it is much more difficult to fix something broken once the damage has settled in. I guess none of them was willing to risk the disruption a fix would have caused. And the system seemed to have held up for quite a while. Weren't there some mass firings of ATC personal at the beginning of the Trump presidency?
The bottom line is: don't break things that are difficult or impossible to fix.
The is a good idea, but once they are broken, you should at least try to fix them, or bear some of the blame for not having tried.
Or instead of pointing fingers we can uses our brains to solve the problems and increase safety.
You could spend a ton of time and money automating the process, and probably should especially in the future with the proliferation of drones.
But in the meantime there are simple solutions. Tunnels. No ground vehicles should be crossing runways when then could go under.
It might sound simple, but won't tunnels lower the strength of the runways (I presume that's where you would put them)? Strengthening that would create an expensive solution to a basic communication problem. That's like saying instead of 4 way stops, we elevate the two intersecting roads to avoid collision, just because someone may have ran the stop sign.
Also, ground vehicles typically need to be on the ground for a reason. Why seperate them?
The issue is the shortage, which that doesn't address. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Was in three different unions. Union didn't do squat for me. Mainly kept my wages down and gave the friends of the union rep the best shifts.
Firing them all broke the pipeline
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495739
When I don't show up to work I expect to get fired and not rehired too.
When I heard about the crash I immediately recalled the recent articles about ATC shortages and overworked ATC's. And here we are. ONE dude running ATC for LaGuardia. Mind boggling.
I place no blame on the ATC as they were doing everything they could given the shit sandwich they were handed. I see this happening all over with staffs getting pared down to minimums, more (sometimes unpaid) over time, prices going up, and no raises.
I’m not trying to minimize a tragedy, but maybe this is almost the perfect wake up call?
Not many fatalities but nevertheless a spectacular collision. At a major hub airport in a major city. It’s hard to look away from, the cause is obvious, and all that without hundreds of deaths.
The perfect wake up call before this perfect wake up call was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...
Imagine how good the next wake up call will be!
See also Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster: https://theonion.com/preemptive-memorial-honors-future-victi...
they hit snooze
There are no "wake up calls" in America. If nothing changed after Sandy Hook, then nothing was ever going to change.
In the future, you'll wear your cow collar, own nothing, and like it.
It's not minimizing, it's galvanizing. 100% A wake up call. I don't fly much but I was bothered by the earlier ATC stories and now I don't feel safe at all.
Flying is still safer than driving.
Much less so for the last 14 months
Agreed. There are a whole bucketload of problems, each one contributing to the staff shortage. The US has problems that other countries don't have (or have less of). It's a long-term organisational issue. None of it is insurmountable, but things need to be done differently, and the politics of that may be insurmountable.
Being an air-traffic controller anywhere in the world is a very intense job at times, and needs a huge amount of proficiency that only a small number of people are capable of doing. Couple that with:
- the FAA expects you to move to where ATCs are needed, so many of the qualified applicants give up when they hear where the posting is. You can't force them to take the job!
- the technology is decades out of date and the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (it's seriously called that) won't roll out until 2028 at the earliest
- Obama's FAA disincentivised its traditional "feeder" colleges that do ATC courses to "promote diversity", net outcome was fewer applicants
- Regan broke the union in the 1980s
- DOGE indiscriminately decimated the FAA like it did most other government departments
> Obama's FAA disincentivised its traditional "feeder" colleges that do ATC courses to "promote diversity", net outcome was fewer applicants
It was much worse than that. Students who had already spent years studying to be air traffic controllers through the CTI program were subject to a sudden policy change that disqualified them from entering the profession unless they passed a “biographical questionnaire.”
85% of candidates failed this questionnaire, but the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (the organization that pushed for this change to begin with) was feeding the “right” answers to its own members.
“Right” answers included things like having gotten bad grades in high school science class. You can take the test for yourself here and see how you score: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/
I can’t blame anyone for thinking this sounds too outrageous to be real, but all of it is public record at this point and the subject of an ongoing lawsuit: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
This test is completely insane. What were the people making it thinking? It feels like half of the scored questions have point values assigned at random. Why does being unemployed for 1-2 months before enrolling in the program award you 10 points, 5-6 months is 8 points, yet 3-4 is a fat zero? There's so many questions with these random score assignments. Why does having real qualifications related to your job only give you a point or two, but some random factoid like taking unrelated courses or doing poorly in college history give upwards of 15 points? Why is child labor rewarded, with more points given the earlier you started?
Unless I'm missing something, this couldn't have been designed by a human being with normal goals in mind. This feels like a test that was created to act as a locked door that you could only pass by knowing the exact password, the sequence of lies you had to produce. That anyone's career was at the mercy of THIS is deranged. What the hell is going on in the US?
I actually looked into becoming an ATC controller a year or two ago (I love aviation) and they had an age cap of ~30 to start training. I'm 32, so ruled out.
31. If you had started 2 years ago you should have been fine.
According to NYT it seems like there were 2 controllers and “2 more in the building”. They also wrote that 2 seems normal for the late slower time of the night.
Not saying this is the right number of controllers to have, just sharing what I read in NYT.
The US intentionally created the ATC shortage. From Wikipedia:
The PATCO Strike of 1981 was a union-organized work stoppage by air traffic controllers (ATCs) in the United States. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) declared a strike on August 3, 1981, after years of tension between controllers and the federal government over long hours, chronic understaffing, outdated equipment, and rising workplace stress. Despite 13,000 ATCs striking, the strike ultimately failed, as the Reagan administration was able to replace the striking ATCs, resulting in PATCO's decertification.
The failure of the PATCO strike impacted the American labor movement, accelerating the decline in labor unions in the country, and initiating a much more aggressive anti-union policy by the federal government and private sector employers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...
Setting people up for failure and then using them as scapegoats, this simply infuriates me.
Expecting a single person to consistently keep their mental picture clear and perfect for their entire career is asinine and irresponsible.
We need systems and tools to eliminate such errors and support people, not use them as a person to blame when things inevitably go wrong.
Why drain resources training more controllers when we're having energy collapse? Even if they start pumping oil, it will only delay the inevitable. What would we do with all the extra controllers if we have to fire them in ten years anyway?
From the article:
> But he [Sean Duffy] denied rumors that the tower had only one controller on duty.
I'm going to make myself unpopular and ask if an AI could have prevented this accident.
You are absolulety right, the blockchain could have prevented this accident
You don't need modern AI; you can build a system that does voice recognition, models the airport and airspace, and applies looks for violations.
Actually, you might be able to try this. Live ATC and radar is available.
No expert here, low-time GA decades ago. I regard these incidents as aspects of the universal race to the economic bottom.
The workloads are too high. Nobody running life-critical operations should be working 60+ hour weeks and overnight shifts. We've known for decades how these practices increase errors. One effective answer is to dilute the workload by hiring more people. But this slows the race to lower costs, so it isn't done. We need to spend more on people.
With all the advances in technology, can there be no navigation app that can just tell you you're on a collision course instead of relying exclusivly on playing broken phone between flying and driving meatbags via a sitting one?
There is actually a set of lights which should have displayed red towards the trucks.
Were they not operating correctly, or did the driver ignore them is one of the questions the investigation will answer.
The system is called Runway Status Lights. And in case there is a disagreement between the ATC clearance and the lights the drivers are supposed to not enter the runway.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
RWSL were red in the video. https://viewfromthewing.com/__trashed-13/ So maybe we'll be looking at training and fatigue for the firefighters too
In the video it looks as if the other emergency vehicles have stopped and only the first truck is driving. Maybe they missed the light or it turned red just after the first truck passed the light.
The description is a bit vague, but I guess this should've automatically caught the landing plane immediately after it got the approval and started landing?
> When activated, these red lights indicate that ... there is an aircraft on final approach within the activation area
It is not working based on approval but based on sensors observing the airplane on final. Even if the plane is landing without clearance, even if the ATC is held hostage by a terorist or having a stroke the lights should turn red when an airplane is approaching the runway from the sky.
This pdf talks more about how it is implemented: https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/WEB_Final_RWSL.p...
“RWSL is driven by fused multi-sensor surveillance system information. Using Airport Surface Detection Equipment-Model X (ASDE-X), external surveillance information is taken from three sources that provide position and other information for aircraft and vehicles on or near the airport surface. RWSL safety logic processes the surveillance information and commands the field lighting system to turn the runway status lights on and off in accordance with the motion of the detected traffic.”
There is one. It's called ASDE-X. The truck wasn't participating.
GA has FLARM.
To get an idea of the crazy workload some of these controllers are experiencing, the beginning of this video has an untrimmed 1-minute excerpt of ATC communications for Newark approach. Even the rest of the video, which has some editing, has no silences removed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKjBCEubtBI
Full narrative of the report in question:
> LGA Tower initiated a takeoff clearance for an aircraft waiting on 13 when we were only 300 feet high on final for 22. The voice accepting the takeoff clearance, most likely the First Officer, did not seem concerned, but the departing aircraft seemed to hesitate moving for a couple seconds. I believe this was because the Captain of that flight was likely the pilot flying, and was in a position to see how close we were to landing. I think he or she thought twice before starting their takeoff roll. Due to the thick smoky haze from the Canadian wildfires and a possible helicopter in the area, I judged it safer to continue the approach and land around 10 seconds after the departing aircraft crossed our path, instead of suddenly going around and trusting that the helicopter was not near the departure end of 22. The guidance in ATC’s 7110.65 does not seem to give guidance on exactly how close aircraft in this situation can get. Based on today’s and close calls I have seen over the years for Runway 27R/35 at PHL and 22L/29 at EWR, it seems to be a judgement call by the Local Controller. Another concern is that the portion of the runway status light system visible to aircraft departing 13 appears to have been disabled. In the past, this system provided an additional layer of safety to prevent runway incursions. Now, I never see it light up anymore when I am waiting in position on 13 while a plane lands on 22. The pace of operations is building in LGA. The controllers are pushing the line. On thunderstorm days, LGA is starting to feel like DCA did before the accident there. Please do something. At least turn the RWSL for 13 back on.
I think it's misleading to act like this was some kind of whistleblower.
"He said LaGuardia was “very well staffed”, with 33 certified controllers and more in training. He said the goal was to have 37 on staff."
I'm just tired of bullshit rhetoric. 33 is less than 37, that's "understaffed" not "very well staffed". Fuck Sean and our "leaders"... they speak with unauthority and spiritlessness.
I am alarmed at the high number of supposed engineers on this thread that are seemingly unaware of how safety-critical systems work. Literally every other piece of this system has redundancy built into it. Robustness is never optional in a scenario involving human safety.
When did this lunacy become an arguable position?
This is my field and the amount of extremely confident nonsense I've read on here in the last 24 hours is going to put me in the cardiac ICU.
You're still using outdated bio-hearts? Wouldn't it be better to just use a cronjob on a server-controlled heart?
Actual lol. Thank you. :)
I'm not in aerospce field, but surprised how low-tech and critical to human error takeoff/landing/taxi process is.
We have TCAS/ACAS in air, but no similar automatic safety guards near/on the field?
TCAS is much simpler than your proposal. Ensuring that traffic can't get too close to you in midair is a different problem from analyzing complex, non-linear movements at tightly-packed airports. How do you implement this system while avoiding false positives?
Imagine that you're landing at one of two parallel runways. There's a plane lining up on the other runway. You can't have proximity warnings like TCAS, because this is a safe situation even though you get close to the other plane. What if that plane is taxiing towards your runway? You can't predict its movements until it starts entering the runway because it may just stop at the hold short line, as it should. Extrapolate this simple scenario to anything that could ever happen at airports with a large variety of actors, and you'll start to see why everyone in the world is still relying on humans to do this.
We do have that on the ground. The truck wasn't participating.
The real answer is that the airline industry is huge, and adding more safety measures will cost billions, and it'll dampen the stock market in the short term. Also, because there's ample room for finger-pointing, the decision-makers who could push for better safety are unlikely to be sued. Your local theme park is probably obsessive with maintenance and safety features, because they'll definitely get a lawsuit if someone is injured.
Clickbait detected:
> Nasa reports show repeated warnings of close calls before crash...
So was there an increase in repeated warnings before crash, or was there just the normal amount of warnings over a long period of time? If you go to that database they are referencing (using that web1.0 interface), there are a lot of reports, even ones marked 'critical'.
I hear a lot of folks ascribing safety to physical human shortages in staffing.
Looking at airport security, it's impossible not to ascribe waste, fraud and abuse if indeed there is a lack of ATC hires causing this. We can go without a greeter at the beginning of the security line, or a pre-screener of boarding passes halfway through the security line and have an extra ATC on duty. If you can't find the extra $ for that you're either blind or we need to charge each passenger $1 more.
The truth is, this sort of situational control shouldn't really be given to a human.
This is exactly the kind of thing a computer should be handling, in the same way we don't have a traffic guard at every intersection. Yes I understand airports are complex. So you have a computer and a human, and they work together.
> Yes I understand airports are complex. So you have a computer and a human, and they work together.
how do you think it works today? some guy with binoculars?
One of the issues being explored is that although US radar is aged, surface vehicles can be equipped with ASDE-X transponders to be more visible to ATC systems. https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/asde-x
The vehicle that crashed into the plane did not have one and thus no automated alert was triggered.
> According to the aviation safety reporting system administered by the US space agency Nasa...
Aeronautics, yes, but I was still surprised to see NASA and not the FAA here. But folllowing up here https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/overview/immunity.html
> The FAA determined that ASRP effectiveness would be greatly enhanced if NASA, rather than the FAA, accomplished the receipt, processing, and analysis of raw data. This would ensure the anonymity of the reporter and of all parties involved in a reported occurrence or incident and, consequently, increase the flow of information necessary for the effective evaluation of the safety and efficiency of the NAS.
Very neat. It's by design. Well done.
I work in exactly this space as a NASA contractor. I don't actually have a massive amount of insight into the FAA, but my impression is that they don't do much in the way of R&D on their own. I think (without hard numbers mind you) the vast majority of FAA R&D work starts at NASA or other government labs and gets transferred to the FAA when it gets to a sufficient level of maturity. In that context, it's even more natural for NASA to host the ASRS system.
Fast, cheap or good. Pick two. It seems like they've been prioritizing fast (lots of planes) and cheap (low staffing, outdated equipment) and paying lip service to good (safety).
Everybody is, not just the pilots. The US ATC system has been in a state of induced crisis since Reagan broke the union's back in the 1980s. Then Trump took office, laid off a bunch of people, cancelled a bunch of hires, and immediately that led to the conditions for the Potomac / DCA collision.
The US is just in an active state of collapse in many areas, including air travel.
It is surprising to me that airports do not use an interlock system for deconflicting the various paths segments that may be occupied by a vehicle. Trains have used mechanical ones since the 1800s [0]. The story and comments seem to indicate the only thing preventing collisions is the mind of one person--that sounds insane.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking
While it's not as sophisticated, there is a technology called Runway Entrance Lights [0] that does somewhat the same thing in the specific context of this incident. LGA is one of 20 airports around the country where this system is installed, and you can clearly see that the system was functioning if you know where to look in the surveillance video that is circulating online. For whatever reason, the truck did not respect the indicator that they should not enter the runway. So in this specific incident, short of rail-like physical limitations on movement, I think it's unlikely that any amount of additional technology would have helped.
0: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
A runway light does not physically prevent a vehicle from entering a restricted area in the same way that an interlock would. Not saying it’s practical but an interlock would have indeed prevented an accident of this type.
Yes, I get that. But an airport is not a rail network. The question is how you would actually implement physical interlocks on an airport in a way that works and is safe while controlling movement of everything from a pickup truck to an A380? It's an incredibly hard problem to solve. And keeping in mind too that the Runway Status/Entrance Lights first started development over 30 years ago and are still only deployed at 20 airports, despite being a vastly simpler system than one controlling physical barriers.
I'm curious how much of a buffer there is between the time the sensors detect the airplane and it being safe to enter the runway.
Is it definitely safe to cross the runway in a vehicle moving a normal speed up to the moment before the lights turn red? Is it safe for a little bit afterward? Or is it unsafe even a little before the lights turn red?
If school busses can look both ways before crossing train tracks you'd think a firetruck would look both ways for airplanes coming down a runway. Don't want to blame the firemen though - this was a series of extrmeemly unfortuante scenarios and people trying to keep the airport running safely. For years people have been on soap boxes saying the FAA/NTSB needs to do better, and yet year after year they are poorly run and poorly funded.
A quick Google gives me that a 737 typically lands between 144 and 180 mph. I think that's quite a lot faster than most people are watching out for. Good news is they are bigger than cars and so easier to spot at a distance but I'm still skeptical that "look before you cross the runway" is sufficiently safe. Keep in mind that the planes may not even be on the ground yet - at the top end in 30s they could go from a 1.5 miles away in the sky (and up to 300-400ft in the air) to plowing through your position (iirc runways are about 2 miles long for jets).
I wonder if it'd even be reliable to see such a plane coming fast enough.
Now multiply that by the dozens of planes in your vicinity, and by the 100ish big US airports.
> I think that's quite a lot faster than most people are watching out for
That isn't even beyond the top speed of a car, which non-trained humans are very well capable of tracking by sight - to talk of airport workers that are specifically trained to look for air traffic. It really is not that hard to tell that an aircraft is on short final if you are actually looking at it.
With four miles of visibility in light rain at night, the aircraft should have been perfectly visible (in a vacuum); what remains to be determined is why the ARFF crew did not see it. The answer to that could range from "they didn't look at all" to "the orientation of the runway relative to the surrounding neighbourhoods meant that the CRJ's lights got lost in the city lights".
Does anyone know why the fire truck was driving across the runway in the first place? Was it a patrol, repositioning the truck, or was there an active incident that they were responding to? Seems like reducing the number of times you have to drive across an active runway is in general a good thing, but perhaps at an airport this old this is the only way to get from A to B.
> Does anyone know why the fire truck was driving across the runway in the first place?
Yes we know. There was an other airplane who declared an emergency and was about to evacuate the passengers on the tarmac. The other plane in question had two aborted takeoffs, and then they smelled some “odour” in the aft of the plane which made some of the crew feel ill.
I believe it was responding to the other active incident that the ATC was also handling where a plane failed to take off?
Was the 2nd plane on a runway still also?
it was on a taxiway. The fire truck had to cross the runway to get to it.
Thanks for the info, I wasnt sure if the fire truck crossing the runway was normal operation.
They were responding to an incident (unidentified odor on another plane)
Maybe they could try using ICE agents as air traffic controllers too
I've been an ICE agent for about a year now after a 12 year career in law enforcement, and prior to that did 4 years in the Navy. So I would love to do the training and help out with that.
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> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Half the comments in this thread are not following the guidelines
yours included buddy