8 ms·

While modernizing ATC in the US may be overdue, the real issue here is that ATC in the US has been understaffed, underpaid, and overworked for a while now. My

While modernizing ATC in the US may be overdue, the real issue here is that ATC in the US has been understaffed, underpaid, and overworked for a while now. My father works ATC and his schedule has him working overtime, 6 shifts a week, including overnight shifts, meaning that there is literally not a day of the week where he doesn't spend at least some time in the tower. If that's the reality for even half of the controllers, it's no surprise that we've been seeing more and more traffic accidents lately.

doctorpangloss 6mo ago
Why do so many jobs have this failure mode? Thinking about this should illuminate for you that funding is not the whole story.
- jmalicki 6mo ago
  Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.
  - doctorpangloss 6mo ago
    this whole thing about funding and disaster is a big red herring. it tells me why we're talking about it, but it has nothing to do with how to solve the real, meaningful socioeconomic problem and why it keeps coming up in so many jobs. this is SO simple to understand but people resist it stubbornly. they WANT outrage. economic stuff isn't outrageous. > tendency to strip funding until disaster happens well there's a tendency to pass unfunded mandates too. They are two sides of the same coin. Here's another way I've heard it described, to show you that this is a "bipartisan" issue: > the Daily Show problem. I love the Daily Show, and I think Jon Stewart is hysterical. But literally the answer to every single problem is “Congress should pass a new law.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-conversation.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-c... i don't think Marc Andreessen knows everything about everything the way that he thinks that he does. but he's not wrong. you are in the really lame "Congress should pass a new law" department - i guess to increase funding? - but you know, then it becomes, i don't see why it would be "enough" funding, we don't know, they could strike anyway... personally, i believe the problem with guilded professions like "ATC guy" come about from complex but nonetheless finite incentives. so in a narrow sense, as long as some ATC controllers want to "work more, earn more," this problem will persist, it doesn't even have to be all ATC controllers, or even many, but the proportion of "work more, earn more" to "work less, earn less" personalities predicts the scale of the issues facing buyers of the guilded profession's services. other economists have talked about this and i'm sure someone will write great Causality Revolution paper about it for ATC. broadly I think the problem has much more to do with the lack of economic opportunity in America, that there's minimum wage and everything else, and people are very risk averse like their peers in Europe or Asia but have less of a safety net so they are much more desperate. everyone is looking to guilds to solve their problem instead of demanding that their leaders support and deliver real growth, which makes me sound like Peter Thiel, and that should tell you everything you need to know about why this problem is so hard to solve. it's all politics, not a misunderstanding of the math about maintenance or disasters or whatever the fuck.
    - jmalicki 6mo ago
      We recently had a lot more probationary ATCs cut because of specific action by Elon Musk's DOGE, which has since then resulted in two major air disasters due to poor ATC handling, which was virtually unheard of before. This isn't some vague problem, it's a random asshole screaming "delete! Delete! Delete!" enlisting some random college dropouts to execute it for him, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives directly attributable to those short sighted changes. This isn't a vague problem, it's a specific asshole who is killing people so he can appear on stage with a chainsaw.
    - watwut 6mo ago
      Considering congress republicans are dead set to cause maximal damage, congress being between useless and harmful might just be correct diagnosis of the problem. Also, ATC controllers are not the one in power here. It is not like they would made the decisions that lead to here.
- smallerize 6mo ago
  Well, there was the time Ronald Reagan fired all the ATC workers [Edit: I had the reason wrong but I still blame Reagan.]
  - coredog64 6mo ago
    They were already in a union (PATCO) and they were striking illegally which lead to their decertification.
    - cogman10 6mo ago
      What's impressive is that if you look at the issues PATCO struck over, it was basically identical to the problems ATC faces today. The problem being that everything has only gotten a lot worse for ATC controllers. The union pretty loudly and early on pointed out major problems with that job and the response of ignoring them for 4 decades is what's driven us to the current situation.
    - kadoban 6mo ago
      Technically accurate. A union that isn't allowed to legally strike when needed isn't a useful union though. The state that ATC has been in for the decades after that suggests to me that they were correct to strike.
    - travisgriggs 6mo ago
      Huh. This seems selectively simplified. At least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_.... Multiple economic write ups have concluded that Reagan’s “stick it to the upstart guy” cost us tax payers way more than it would if they’d just acceded and maybe even thrown in a gracious bonus to say thanks. Larger sociology say the intangible cost to labor balance laws actually were much more. Reagan’s trickle down (great euphemism for “piss on”) movement was the beginning of the demise of the GOP IMO. Disclaimed: I voted both times for him and many GOP followers.
    - anigbrowl 6mo ago
      striking illegally How dare those peons use their economic leverage! That's only for the upper class
- jjk166 6mo ago
  Inadequate funding seems like the common factor across the vast majority of jobs with these failure modes.
  - nine_k 6mo ago
    When paying for a (rare) failure is cheaper than paying for the (constant) absence of failure, it's just natural. You know, the optimal amount of fraud in a payment system is not zero. The optimal amount of fatal aircraft incidents is not an exact substitute, bit the pressure is of the same kind, I'm afraid :(
    - jjk166 6mo ago
      Did the FAA or some other agency release a statement saying they were relaxing safety standards because they deemed the increase in risk economically acceptable? Do you recall checking a box when booking your last flight acknowledging you would prefer a few cents off your ticket to a fully staffed ATC tower? Did safety technology suddenly get substantially worse, increasing the cost of preventing failure beyond a red line we set? Failures will happen, and resources are finite. But the idea that this particular failure is an inevitable consequence of a rational economic decision, that we as a society got together and decided we would permit X fatal aircraft incidents per unit of time, and that there is no point in improving because perfection is impossible, is patently absurd. No, we have been and currently are willing to pay for fully staffed air traffic control towers to prevent precisely this sort of accident. If you told someone at the airport there was a single controller doing double duty, there's a good chance they would choose to pay a premium to change flights to a time when the ATC was appropriately staffed. There is a reasonable expectation that when you book a service like a flight that you are paying for the appropriate staffing to provide that service. I'm paying for the person who maintains the engines, and the person who audits the paperwork to make sure the maintenance got done, and the engineer who checks that the latest revision won't cause the engine to explode in mid-air, and all the rest of the massive chain of people required for air travel to work as its supposed to. The airline is supposed to set the price such that they can afford to pay all these people. They don't get to make the decision that they can take my money and pocket what was supposed to be going towards engine maintenance because they don't value my life sufficiently. Likewise for air traffic control.
- heraldgeezer 6mo ago
  Because we need to trust people and it is not sustainable to overstaff. In my job we work 40h a week + oncall rotating. It works.
bikelang 6mo ago
Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the boiling?
- fHr 6mo ago
  As long as we're desperate for a job and we need to finance our lifestyle to impress the Johnsons.
  - ExtraRoulette 6mo ago
    It's not even to impress anyone, we need to keep roofs over our heads and food in our family's bellies
    - jewayne 6mo ago
      Oh, look whose family has a roof over their head and food in their bellies! We get it, @ExtraRoulette. You're big pimpin'.
      - jacquesm 6mo ago
        I think we now have the answer to your query: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046401 But I don't think we should extrapolate from it.
    - heraldgeezer 6mo ago
      Y'all can do with a bit less of that. Overweight/obesity combined: ~73-75% (nearly 3 in 4 adults) in the US.
      - munk-a 6mo ago
        It's quite a tired take that the obesity epidemic is because Americans have too much affordable access to good food. America has affordable access to terrible food and while people can keep their bellies full on that actually eating healthily is a luxury.
aeternum 6mo ago
No that is not the issue. Runway incursions have always been a problem and many deaths have occurred. There have been many attempts to change phraseology, teach pilots and controllers to always readback runways, etc. but nothing that actually prevents the issue from occurring entirely via automation.
- nine_k 6mo ago
  The incursion was by a fire engine which was hurrying to handle yet another incident. The weather was foggy, it was raining, and the incoming plane was already low, so it was pretty hard to tell it apart from many other lights shining from the fog in the distance. It's not easy to assess the speed of motion when a fuzzy ball of light is advancing right towards you. The pilot was given the clearance to land before the fire engine was dispatched. Apparently there was not even enough time for the crew to max out the thrust and try to lift off the strip even if they managed to notice the lights of the incoming fire engine.
  - aeternum 6mo ago
    Planes use a system called TCAS to prevent collisions in the sky, this system is independent of ATC and works even if ATC is not paying attention or if pilots have the wrong frequency tuned. It detects impending collisions and gives both pilots clear and automated alerts plus an action IE climb + turn to execute immediately to prevent a collision. A similar system can and should be used for runways. As a thought experiment, imagine how many car accidents there would be if instead of traffic lights, each person had a AM radio in their car and police officers called out over the radio which cars should proceed across the intersection. That is the unfortunate state of modern? aviation.
    - ceejayoz 6mo ago
      TCAS disables below 1,000 feet because there’s too much stuff at an airport.
      - oceanplexian 6mo ago
thefounder 6mo ago
Can’t this whole thing being automated and let only special/unexpected situations being handled by humans ?
- pjc50 6mo ago
  Nowhere has automated ATC because errors look like this.
  - alex43578 6mo ago
    That's like the argument about how we'll never (or should never) have self driving cars. Clearly human-run ATC results in situations like this, so the idea that automated ATC could result in a runway collision and should therefore never be implemented is bad.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - mikepurvis 6mo ago
      It's not an argument for total automation but an argument for machine augmentation. It would be fascinating just as an experiment to feed the audio of the ATC + flight tracks [1] into a bot and see if it could spot that a collision situation had been created. You obviously wouldn't authorize the bot to do everything, but you could allow it to autonomously call for stops or go-arounds in a situation like this where a matter of a few seconds almost certainly would have made the difference. Imagine the human controller gives the truck clearance to cross and the bot immediately sees the problem and interrupts with "No, Truck 1 stop, no clearance. JZA 646 pull up and go around." If either message gets through then the collision is avoided, and in case of a false positive, it's a 30 second delay for the truck and a few minutes to circle the plane around and give it a new slot. [1]: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/ https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/
      - alex43578 6mo ago
        I'm not well-enough versed in HMI design or similar concepts, but I think this idea for augmentation could collide with alarm fatigue and the disengaged overseer problem in self-driving cars. If we aren't confident enough in the automation to allow it to make the call for something simple like a runway incursion/conflict (via total automation), augmentation might be worse than the current approach that calls for 100% awareness by the ATC. Self-driving research shows that at level 2 and level 3, people tune out and need time to get back "in the zone" during a failure of automation.
hajile 6mo ago
Overwork is an issue in general, but I don't know that it was the actual issue here. > In audio from the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia, a staff member can be heard saying: "'Truck One, stop, stop, stop!" in the seconds before the crash. It sounds to me like either the Cop or the Firefighter (whichever was driving) wasn't listening to ATC and this whole incident was probably completely avoidable. EDIT: a video of the crash seems to have warning lights that the emergency vehicle ignored.
- lotsofpulp 6mo ago
  The audio I heard seems to show the firetruck asking if the runway is clear to cross, the controller responding in the affirmative, the firetruck confirming the affirmative, and then 7 seconds later, the controller saying STOP STOP STOP. https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/ https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/
  - hajile 6mo ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Kqg6sokz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Kqg6sokz4 It seems like less than 2 seconds from declaring intent to cross until they are told not to cross. The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.
    - deathanatos 6mo ago
      From the description: > Audio is not synced. I think the gaps between transmissions have been trimmed, too; this isn't matching other versions of the ATC audio, such as [VASAviation's][1]. > The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag. IANA-ATC, but presumably in an emergency, you're permitted to obtain clearance from ATC to enter an active runaway, to get to the emergency. (Which they did, and got, but which ATC later effectively revokes with the command to stop, prior to the accident. Whether ATC should have granted the clearance, well, I'll wait for the NTSB report there.) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY
rahimnathwani 6mo ago
Don't air traffic controllers get paid at a higher rate for overtime than for their 'regular hours'? If so, doesn't the understaffing (lower # of employees) result in each employee being overpaid (paid a higher hourly rate)? EDIT: And it seems like air traffic controllers can retire after just 20 years and draw a defined benefit pension: https://www.faa.gov/nyc-atc https://www.faa.gov/nyc-atc
- cenamus 6mo ago
  Nurses also get paid more for night shifts, doesn't mean they're 'overpaid'
  - anigbrowl 6mo ago
    I think GP means if we're paying overtime for so many people we're wasting money vs hiring more people to work at regular pay scales. The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?
    - throwup238 6mo ago
      > The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited? ATC has been a shit career prospect for a while now so no one wants to enter training. For one it requires uprooting your entire life to live near a training center, then they send you on an apprenticeship to a random airport in the country for a few years. And since there are only so many slots in the desirable metros, most people get sent to live somewhere “undesirable” to say the least. For two, while trainees get paid they get totally fucked during government shutdowns. Many who make it to the funnel also quit at that point. Without fundamental structural changes to how they’re trained and paid at the political level, the number of trainees will remain small.
- lelandbatey 6mo ago
  Yes, when they work overtime they get paid more for that overtime than regular time. The money doesn't somehow make it sustainable for the people burning out their lives. Working 7 days a week, including overnight shifts, for 20 years to collect a pension seems like WELL earned compensation. That's seems unrelated to "we have so few" and "we enmiserate the one's we do have".
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
urbandw311er 6mo ago
Why are we discussing the issue being ATC workers when the recordings make it clear that they had identified the issue and ordered the vehicle to stop? Sound like the issue is whoever was driving the truck not doing what was asked of them for whatever reason. Unless of course it was equipment failure.
- jlawson 6mo ago
  The controller told the truck to proceed, before telling it to stop. That was a serious ATC error.
  - ceejayoz 6mo ago
    If the timings on the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY are accurate, it had time to cross; it seems they dawdled a bit. Controller probably should've told them to expedite the crossing or warned that traffic was about to land, but they were managing a lot at once; tower+ground by themselves and an emergency already.
    - markdown 6mo ago
      The poor guy was managing two runways and ground traffic, which is nuts.
      - dghlsakjg 6mo ago
        This isn’t super unusual, it’s just that when they do this it’s normally at an airport in east bumfuck where a controller is barely needed. Doing it at LaGuardia or any major airport is absolutely nuts.
    - phil21 6mo ago
      I counted 8 seconds from clear to cross to first 'truck 1 stop' - along with it not being immediately clear the stop was for the truck, or for Frontier 4195 until 2 more seconds. Add a few seconds for human reaction time on both ends, I don't think that's really "enough time to cross safely" - maybe if the stars align.
zeristor 6mo ago
Wouldn’t insurance go some way to mediating this? If the ATC is under staffed they’d charge a far higher premium since the risk of accidents is higher. I’m not sure who would be liable for this accident, I’m guessing ATC is a government provided industry, and I understand governments don’t insure.
SamuelAdams 6mo ago
It’s also hard to hire for. Candidates for job openings must be between the ages of 21-31 years old. Yes they are legally forbidden from hiring anyone older. https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications
- khuey 6mo ago
  Since they have a mandatory retirement age of 56 (if they're not retired earlier for health conditions) it's not crazy to have an age cutoff for intake. Why put someone through a 2 year training with a high failure rate if after they make it through all of that you'll get at most 10 years of work out of them?
QuarterReptile 6mo ago
I wonder how much of this can be attributed to breaking the ATC training/hiring pipelines back in 2014. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
- hedora 6mo ago
  I'd guess the randomly firing a bunch of air traffic controllers in 2025 without cause didn't help much either: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-begins-firings-of-faa-air-traffic-control-employees-weeks-after-fatal-dc-plane-crash https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-begins-firings-o...
- jml7c5 6mo ago
  This shifted the race of trainees, but it doesn't seem to have changed the more important metric of how many people were actually hired. The author claims it had an effect, but as far as I can tell he's never quantified it. The real issue is just insufficient slots.
kaliqt 6mo ago
That is not the real issue. Less people would be required if it was modernized.

doctorpangloss 6mo ago

Why do so many jobs have this failure mode? Thinking about this should illuminate for you that funding is not the whole story.

jmalicki 6mo ago
Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.
- doctorpangloss 6mo ago
  this whole thing about funding and disaster is a big red herring. it tells me why we're talking about it, but it has nothing to do with how to solve the real, meaningful socioeconomic problem and why it keeps coming up in so many jobs. this is SO simple to understand but people resist it stubbornly. they WANT outrage. economic stuff isn't outrageous. > tendency to strip funding until disaster happens well there's a tendency to pass unfunded mandates too. They are two sides of the same coin. Here's another way I've heard it described, to show you that this is a "bipartisan" issue: > the Daily Show problem. I love the Daily Show, and I think Jon Stewart is hysterical. But literally the answer to every single problem is “Congress should pass a new law.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-conversation.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-c... i don't think Marc Andreessen knows everything about everything the way that he thinks that he does. but he's not wrong. you are in the really lame "Congress should pass a new law" department - i guess to increase funding? - but you know, then it becomes, i don't see why it would be "enough" funding, we don't know, they could strike anyway... personally, i believe the problem with guilded professions like "ATC guy" come about from complex but nonetheless finite incentives. so in a narrow sense, as long as some ATC controllers want to "work more, earn more," this problem will persist, it doesn't even have to be all ATC controllers, or even many, but the proportion of "work more, earn more" to "work less, earn less" personalities predicts the scale of the issues facing buyers of the guilded profession's services. other economists have talked about this and i'm sure someone will write great Causality Revolution paper about it for ATC. broadly I think the problem has much more to do with the lack of economic opportunity in America, that there's minimum wage and everything else, and people are very risk averse like their peers in Europe or Asia but have less of a safety net so they are much more desperate. everyone is looking to guilds to solve their problem instead of demanding that their leaders support and deliver real growth, which makes me sound like Peter Thiel, and that should tell you everything you need to know about why this problem is so hard to solve. it's all politics, not a misunderstanding of the math about maintenance or disasters or whatever the fuck.
  - jmalicki 6mo ago
    We recently had a lot more probationary ATCs cut because of specific action by Elon Musk's DOGE, which has since then resulted in two major air disasters due to poor ATC handling, which was virtually unheard of before. This isn't some vague problem, it's a random asshole screaming "delete! Delete! Delete!" enlisting some random college dropouts to execute it for him, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives directly attributable to those short sighted changes. This isn't a vague problem, it's a specific asshole who is killing people so he can appear on stage with a chainsaw.
  - watwut 6mo ago
    Considering congress republicans are dead set to cause maximal damage, congress being between useless and harmful might just be correct diagnosis of the problem. Also, ATC controllers are not the one in power here. It is not like they would made the decisions that lead to here.
smallerize 6mo ago
Well, there was the time Ronald Reagan fired all the ATC workers [Edit: I had the reason wrong but I still blame Reagan.]
- coredog64 6mo ago
  They were already in a union (PATCO) and they were striking illegally which lead to their decertification.
  - cogman10 6mo ago
    What's impressive is that if you look at the issues PATCO struck over, it was basically identical to the problems ATC faces today. The problem being that everything has only gotten a lot worse for ATC controllers. The union pretty loudly and early on pointed out major problems with that job and the response of ignoring them for 4 decades is what's driven us to the current situation.
  - kadoban 6mo ago
    Technically accurate. A union that isn't allowed to legally strike when needed isn't a useful union though. The state that ATC has been in for the decades after that suggests to me that they were correct to strike.
  - travisgriggs 6mo ago
    Huh. This seems selectively simplified. At least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_.... Multiple economic write ups have concluded that Reagan’s “stick it to the upstart guy” cost us tax payers way more than it would if they’d just acceded and maybe even thrown in a gracious bonus to say thanks. Larger sociology say the intangible cost to labor balance laws actually were much more. Reagan’s trickle down (great euphemism for “piss on”) movement was the beginning of the demise of the GOP IMO. Disclaimed: I voted both times for him and many GOP followers.
  - anigbrowl 6mo ago
    striking illegally How dare those peons use their economic leverage! That's only for the upper class
jjk166 6mo ago
Inadequate funding seems like the common factor across the vast majority of jobs with these failure modes.
- nine_k 6mo ago
  When paying for a (rare) failure is cheaper than paying for the (constant) absence of failure, it's just natural. You know, the optimal amount of fraud in a payment system is not zero. The optimal amount of fatal aircraft incidents is not an exact substitute, bit the pressure is of the same kind, I'm afraid :(
  - jjk166 6mo ago
    Did the FAA or some other agency release a statement saying they were relaxing safety standards because they deemed the increase in risk economically acceptable? Do you recall checking a box when booking your last flight acknowledging you would prefer a few cents off your ticket to a fully staffed ATC tower? Did safety technology suddenly get substantially worse, increasing the cost of preventing failure beyond a red line we set? Failures will happen, and resources are finite. But the idea that this particular failure is an inevitable consequence of a rational economic decision, that we as a society got together and decided we would permit X fatal aircraft incidents per unit of time, and that there is no point in improving because perfection is impossible, is patently absurd. No, we have been and currently are willing to pay for fully staffed air traffic control towers to prevent precisely this sort of accident. If you told someone at the airport there was a single controller doing double duty, there's a good chance they would choose to pay a premium to change flights to a time when the ATC was appropriately staffed. There is a reasonable expectation that when you book a service like a flight that you are paying for the appropriate staffing to provide that service. I'm paying for the person who maintains the engines, and the person who audits the paperwork to make sure the maintenance got done, and the engineer who checks that the latest revision won't cause the engine to explode in mid-air, and all the rest of the massive chain of people required for air travel to work as its supposed to. The airline is supposed to set the price such that they can afford to pay all these people. They don't get to make the decision that they can take my money and pocket what was supposed to be going towards engine maintenance because they don't value my life sufficiently. Likewise for air traffic control.
heraldgeezer 6mo ago
Because we need to trust people and it is not sustainable to overstaff. In my job we work 40h a week + oncall rotating. It works.

bikelang 6mo ago

Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the boiling?

fHr 6mo ago
As long as we're desperate for a job and we need to finance our lifestyle to impress the Johnsons.
- ExtraRoulette 6mo ago
  It's not even to impress anyone, we need to keep roofs over our heads and food in our family's bellies
  - jewayne 6mo ago
    Oh, look whose family has a roof over their head and food in their bellies! We get it, @ExtraRoulette. You're big pimpin'.
    - jacquesm 6mo ago
      I think we now have the answer to your query: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046401 But I don't think we should extrapolate from it.
  - heraldgeezer 6mo ago
    Y'all can do with a bit less of that. Overweight/obesity combined: ~73-75% (nearly 3 in 4 adults) in the US.
    - munk-a 6mo ago
      It's quite a tired take that the obesity epidemic is because Americans have too much affordable access to good food. America has affordable access to terrible food and while people can keep their bellies full on that actually eating healthily is a luxury.

aeternum 6mo ago

No that is not the issue. Runway incursions have always been a problem and many deaths have occurred. There have been many attempts to change phraseology, teach pilots and controllers to always readback runways, etc. but nothing that actually prevents the issue from occurring entirely via automation.

nine_k 6mo ago
The incursion was by a fire engine which was hurrying to handle yet another incident. The weather was foggy, it was raining, and the incoming plane was already low, so it was pretty hard to tell it apart from many other lights shining from the fog in the distance. It's not easy to assess the speed of motion when a fuzzy ball of light is advancing right towards you. The pilot was given the clearance to land before the fire engine was dispatched. Apparently there was not even enough time for the crew to max out the thrust and try to lift off the strip even if they managed to notice the lights of the incoming fire engine.
- aeternum 6mo ago
  Planes use a system called TCAS to prevent collisions in the sky, this system is independent of ATC and works even if ATC is not paying attention or if pilots have the wrong frequency tuned. It detects impending collisions and gives both pilots clear and automated alerts plus an action IE climb + turn to execute immediately to prevent a collision. A similar system can and should be used for runways. As a thought experiment, imagine how many car accidents there would be if instead of traffic lights, each person had a AM radio in their car and police officers called out over the radio which cars should proceed across the intersection. That is the unfortunate state of modern? aviation.
  - ceejayoz 6mo ago
    TCAS disables below 1,000 feet because there’s too much stuff at an airport.
    - oceanplexian 6mo ago

thefounder 6mo ago

Can’t this whole thing being automated and let only special/unexpected situations being handled by humans ?

pjc50 6mo ago
Nowhere has automated ATC because errors look like this.
- alex43578 6mo ago
  That's like the argument about how we'll never (or should never) have self driving cars. Clearly human-run ATC results in situations like this, so the idea that automated ATC could result in a runway collision and should therefore never be implemented is bad.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mikepurvis 6mo ago
    It's not an argument for total automation but an argument for machine augmentation. It would be fascinating just as an experiment to feed the audio of the ATC + flight tracks [1] into a bot and see if it could spot that a collision situation had been created. You obviously wouldn't authorize the bot to do everything, but you could allow it to autonomously call for stops or go-arounds in a situation like this where a matter of a few seconds almost certainly would have made the difference. Imagine the human controller gives the truck clearance to cross and the bot immediately sees the problem and interrupts with "No, Truck 1 stop, no clearance. JZA 646 pull up and go around." If either message gets through then the collision is avoided, and in case of a false positive, it's a 30 second delay for the truck and a few minutes to circle the plane around and give it a new slot. [1]: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/ https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/
    - alex43578 6mo ago
      I'm not well-enough versed in HMI design or similar concepts, but I think this idea for augmentation could collide with alarm fatigue and the disengaged overseer problem in self-driving cars. If we aren't confident enough in the automation to allow it to make the call for something simple like a runway incursion/conflict (via total automation), augmentation might be worse than the current approach that calls for 100% awareness by the ATC. Self-driving research shows that at level 2 and level 3, people tune out and need time to get back "in the zone" during a failure of automation.

hajile 6mo ago

Overwork is an issue in general, but I don't know that it was the actual issue here. > In audio from the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia, a staff member can be heard saying: "'Truck One, stop, stop, stop!" in the seconds before the crash. It sounds to me like either the Cop or the Firefighter (whichever was driving) wasn't listening to ATC and this whole incident was probably completely avoidable. EDIT: a video of the crash seems to have warning lights that the emergency vehicle ignored.

lotsofpulp 6mo ago
The audio I heard seems to show the firetruck asking if the runway is clear to cross, the controller responding in the affirmative, the firetruck confirming the affirmative, and then 7 seconds later, the controller saying STOP STOP STOP. https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/ https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/
- hajile 6mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Kqg6sokz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Kqg6sokz4 It seems like less than 2 seconds from declaring intent to cross until they are told not to cross. The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.
  - deathanatos 6mo ago
    From the description: > Audio is not synced. I think the gaps between transmissions have been trimmed, too; this isn't matching other versions of the ATC audio, such as [VASAviation's][1]. > The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag. IANA-ATC, but presumably in an emergency, you're permitted to obtain clearance from ATC to enter an active runaway, to get to the emergency. (Which they did, and got, but which ATC later effectively revokes with the command to stop, prior to the accident. Whether ATC should have granted the clearance, well, I'll wait for the NTSB report there.) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY

rahimnathwani 6mo ago

Don't air traffic controllers get paid at a higher rate for overtime than for their 'regular hours'? If so, doesn't the understaffing (lower # of employees) result in each employee being overpaid (paid a higher hourly rate)? EDIT: And it seems like air traffic controllers can retire after just 20 years and draw a defined benefit pension: https://www.faa.gov/nyc-atc https://www.faa.gov/nyc-atc

cenamus 6mo ago
Nurses also get paid more for night shifts, doesn't mean they're 'overpaid'
- anigbrowl 6mo ago
  I think GP means if we're paying overtime for so many people we're wasting money vs hiring more people to work at regular pay scales. The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?
  - throwup238 6mo ago
    > The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited? ATC has been a shit career prospect for a while now so no one wants to enter training. For one it requires uprooting your entire life to live near a training center, then they send you on an apprenticeship to a random airport in the country for a few years. And since there are only so many slots in the desirable metros, most people get sent to live somewhere “undesirable” to say the least. For two, while trainees get paid they get totally fucked during government shutdowns. Many who make it to the funnel also quit at that point. Without fundamental structural changes to how they’re trained and paid at the political level, the number of trainees will remain small.
lelandbatey 6mo ago
Yes, when they work overtime they get paid more for that overtime than regular time. The money doesn't somehow make it sustainable for the people burning out their lives. Working 7 days a week, including overnight shifts, for 20 years to collect a pension seems like WELL earned compensation. That's seems unrelated to "we have so few" and "we enmiserate the one's we do have".

deleted 6mo ago

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urbandw311er 6mo ago

Why are we discussing the issue being ATC workers when the recordings make it clear that they had identified the issue and ordered the vehicle to stop? Sound like the issue is whoever was driving the truck not doing what was asked of them for whatever reason. Unless of course it was equipment failure.

jlawson 6mo ago
The controller told the truck to proceed, before telling it to stop. That was a serious ATC error.
- ceejayoz 6mo ago
  If the timings on the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY are accurate, it had time to cross; it seems they dawdled a bit. Controller probably should've told them to expedite the crossing or warned that traffic was about to land, but they were managing a lot at once; tower+ground by themselves and an emergency already.
  - markdown 6mo ago
    The poor guy was managing two runways and ground traffic, which is nuts.
    - dghlsakjg 6mo ago
      This isn’t super unusual, it’s just that when they do this it’s normally at an airport in east bumfuck where a controller is barely needed. Doing it at LaGuardia or any major airport is absolutely nuts.
  - phil21 6mo ago
    I counted 8 seconds from clear to cross to first 'truck 1 stop' - along with it not being immediately clear the stop was for the truck, or for Frontier 4195 until 2 more seconds. Add a few seconds for human reaction time on both ends, I don't think that's really "enough time to cross safely" - maybe if the stars align.

zeristor 6mo ago

Wouldn’t insurance go some way to mediating this? If the ATC is under staffed they’d charge a far higher premium since the risk of accidents is higher. I’m not sure who would be liable for this accident, I’m guessing ATC is a government provided industry, and I understand governments don’t insure.

SamuelAdams 6mo ago

It’s also hard to hire for. Candidates for job openings must be between the ages of 21-31 years old. Yes they are legally forbidden from hiring anyone older. https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications

khuey 6mo ago
Since they have a mandatory retirement age of 56 (if they're not retired earlier for health conditions) it's not crazy to have an age cutoff for intake. Why put someone through a 2 year training with a high failure rate if after they make it through all of that you'll get at most 10 years of work out of them?

QuarterReptile 6mo ago

I wonder how much of this can be attributed to breaking the ATC training/hiring pipelines back in 2014. https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...

hedora 6mo ago
I'd guess the randomly firing a bunch of air traffic controllers in 2025 without cause didn't help much either: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-begins-firings-of-faa-air-traffic-control-employees-weeks-after-fatal-dc-plane-crash https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-begins-firings-o...
jml7c5 6mo ago
This shifted the race of trainees, but it doesn't seem to have changed the more important metric of how many people were actually hired. The author claims it had an effect, but as far as I can tell he's never quantified it. The real issue is just insufficient slots.

kaliqt 6mo ago

That is not the real issue. Less people would be required if it was modernized.