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.
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?
> 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.
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 an economic 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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 like 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
> 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...
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 an economic 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.
> 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
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.
>> One controller overnight is completely reasonable
So if said controller has a medical episode?
"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
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.
I can’t find a way to read this other than
“If we remove regulation, 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"...routinely considered feasible..."
What we are seeing here is the normalization of deviance.
"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.
And therein lies the problem. Clearly, having one overworked controller running a combined tower is not safe nor sustainable.
Planes landing at a rate of one every 30-40 minutes isn't exactly "overworked."
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
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.
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.
What is the contingency/continuity plan if the single controller becomes incapacitated while on duty with no warning to pilots?
What you just described is a long term staffing shortage.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"The system worked yesterday, so it should have worked forever."
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 like 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
Maybe they could try using ICE agents as air traffic controllers too
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
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.
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
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
> 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.
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
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.
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.
They were responding to an incident (unidentified odor on another plane)
Damn, this comment section is perfect example of how HN is no longer feels like HN. it's just reddit now.
> 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