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LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash
Related: Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47486386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47486386 (667 comments)
- notRobot 6mo agoThere 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.
- FL410 6mo agoThis. Go look at the atc subreddit, controllers have been begging for help for ages. This isn't one guy's fault.
- adgjlsfhk1 6mo ago>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)
- voxic11 6mo agoWasn'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 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311 originally passed as https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=2023&num=0&req=granuleid%3AUSC-2023-title5-section7311 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.
- adgjlsfhk1 6mo agoThey were striking for less outdated tools, improving staffing levels, and other safety improvements. The solution was to give them the things they wanted.
- busterarm 6mo agoThe 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.
- jen20 6mo agoThere have been six presidents who could have addressed this since Reagan. Every one of them shoulders some of the responsibility.
- _ph_ 6mo agoYes, 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.
- jen20 6mo agoThe 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.
- _ph_ 6mo agoAbsolutely. But for many things, denial is easier than fixing. See climate change. We knew about the problem for a long time. At latest after the oil crisis in the early 70ies, it would have been the perfect moment to reduce fossil fuel usage. Of course we know, how this has not happened and so we just entered the next oil crisis last week. And everyone is to blame for that.
- jordanb 6mo agoOne thing people forget is that the key complaints PATCO's members had were: 1. outdated equipment 2. staffing levels 3. workload and fatigue Reagan went to war with the union instead of addressing these things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...
- coryrc 6mo agoYou 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.
- achierius 6mo ago> 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.
- coryrc 6mo agoIf 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).
- wahnfrieden 6mo agoA traveler's union? So there is no solution you see?
- denkmoon 6mo agoTry 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.
- newsclues 6mo agoOr 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.
- wsbetter 6mo agoIt 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?
- sonar_un 6mo agoPretty much everything broken in the USA stems directly from Reagen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g95fiZCzjlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g95fiZCzjlo
- antonymoose 6mo agoI’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.
- phendrenad2 6mo agoThis 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...
- 2c0m 6mo agoI 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.
- irishcoffee 6mo ago31. If you had started 2 years ago you should have been fine.
- MisterTea 6mo agoWhen 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.
- m_fayer 6mo agoI’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.
- MisterTea 6mo agoIt'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.
- rationalist 6mo agoFlying is still safer than driving.
- downrightmike 6mo agoMuch less so for the last 14 months
- amiga386 6mo agoThe perfect wake up call before this perfect wake up call was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_collision 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-victims-of-imminent-d-1819594660/ https://theonion.com/preemptive-memorial-honors-future-victi...
- amiga386 6mo agoAgreed. 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
- haberman 6mo ago> 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/ 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-faas-hiring https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
- tavavex 6mo agoThis 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?
- itopaloglu83 6mo agoSetting 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.
- mikpanko 6mo agoAccording 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.
- amelius 6mo agoI'm going to make myself unpopular and ask if an AI could have prevented this accident.
- blitzar 6mo agoYou are absolulety right, the blockchain could have prevented this accident
- dehrmann 6mo agoYou 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.
- kevmo 6mo agoThe 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_Controllers_Organization_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...
- frenchtoast8 6mo agoFrom the article: > But he [Sean Duffy] denied rumors that the tower had only one controller on duty.
- journal 6mo agoWhy 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?
- arjie 6mo ago> 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 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.
- 0xffff2 6mo agoI 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.
- ndiddy 6mo agoI 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.
- metalliqaz 6mo agoHow 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.
- mrbukkake 6mo agoMaybe they could try using ICE agents as air traffic controllers too
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Ehronn 6mo agoI'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.
- mrbukkake 6mo agoThat puts you neatly above the maximum age to start ATC training unfortunately bud
- annexrichmond 6mo ago[flagged]
- antoineMoPa 6mo ago> 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- annexrichmond 6mo agoHalf the comments in this thread are not following the guidelines
- yeeetz 6mo agoyours included buddy
- fred_is_fred 6mo agoDoes 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.
- nemomarx 6mo agoI believe it was responding to the other active incident that the ATC was also handling where a plane failed to take off?
- fred_is_fred 6mo agoWas the 2nd plane on a runway still also?
- avemg 6mo agoit was on a taxiway. The fire truck had to cross the runway to get to it.
- fred_is_fred 6mo agoThanks for the info, I wasnt sure if the fire truck crossing the runway was normal operation.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Hovertruck 6mo agoThey were responding to an incident (unidentified odor on another plane)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
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- adolph 6mo agoIt 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking
- 0xffff2 6mo agoWhile 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 https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
- sentientslug 6mo agoA 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.
- 0xffff2 6mo agoYes, 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.
- eviks 6mo agoWith 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?
- krisoft 6mo agoThere 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 https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
- eviks 6mo agoThe 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
- krisoft 6mo agoIt 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.pdf 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.”
- user2722 6mo ago[flagged]
- rekrsiv 6mo agoI 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?
- ivanjermakov 6mo agoI'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?
- _moof 6mo agoWe do have that on the ground. The truck wasn't participating.
- tavavex 6mo agoTCAS 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- _moof 6mo agoThis 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.
- throwaway5752 6mo agoEverybody 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.
- throw7 6mo ago"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.
- 9front 6mo ago"... 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
- spprashant 6mo agoFeel bad for the ATC officer. I hope they can find it in them to forgive themselves.
- liminal 6mo agoFast, 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).
- ooboe 6mo agoTo 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKjBCEubtBI
- ridgeguy 6mo agoNo 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.
- blobbers 6mo agoI 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.
- tacoooooooo 6mo ago> 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?
- Maxious 6mo agoOne 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 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.
- advisedwang 6mo agoFull 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.
- unit149 6mo ago[dead]
- KevinMS 6mo agoClickbait 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'.