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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. Controll

by ndiddy 7mo ago

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.

metalliqaz 7mo ago
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.
- pklausler 7mo ago
  "The system worked yesterday, so it should have worked forever."
- FL410 7mo ago
  And therein lies the problem. Clearly, having one overworked controller running a combined tower is not safe nor sustainable.
  - pc86 7mo ago
    Planes landing at a rate of one every 30-40 minutes isn't exactly "overworked."
    - gortok 7mo ago
      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.
      - pc86 7mo ago
        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.
        bombcar 7mo ago
        If you have ever spent time listening to LiveATC you will realize that like everyone, "tunnel ear" is a real thing - if United 1002 has received the clearance/instructions they expect, read them back, and are proceeding it can be moderately difficult to get their attention again, even with perfect verbiage.
        mannykannot 7mo ago
        The controller was not guilty of malfeasance, but clearing the trucks onto the runway with an airliner on short final was a mistake, no matter whatever else one could say about it.
    - VK-pro 7mo ago
      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.
  - zardo 7mo ago
    It seems like a critical enough role that you probably want two people there in case one has a medical emergency anyway. Even if it's not that busy.
    - xeromal 7mo ago
      I believe other areas can assist when something like that happens.
- ryanmcbride 7mo ago
  Maybe there should be more than one
  - metalliqaz 7mo ago
    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.
    - RankingMember 7mo ago
      > 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.
      - thmsths 7mo ago
        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.
        pc86 7mo ago
        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.
        adrr 7mo ago
        Its weird that there strict laws that limit pilot hours to under 40 hours a week but no laws that restrict number of hours ATC works.
- jen20 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - metalliqaz 7mo ago
    There are other people there, but the person on the radio is doing both.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- cjrp 7mo ago
  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.
- jakelazaroff 7mo ago
  You are describing a staffing shortage.
  - pc86 7mo ago
    "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?
    - Someone1234 7mo ago
      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.
      - volkl48 7mo ago
        It does quiet down eventually. There's no scheduled departures 22:55-5:45 and only a handful of arrivals 23:59-6:45. However, arrivals stay pretty heavy right up until 23:59 even on schedule and if you've got a lot of delayed flights (not exactly uncommon at LGA) - you may still have a lot of departures going out in the 23:00 hour. I would not be surprised to learn that they're staffed to an appropriate level for what the schedule says is supposed to be operating at that time, but a very inadequate level for what actually winds up operating at that time on many days. Initial analysis suggests they were running about 75% of full capacity in flight ops in the 15min prior to the accident. I doubt they were staffed to 75% of the daytime peak.
    - alistairSH 7mo ago
      You can't think of any scenario having one controller makes sense? At one of the nation's busiest airports? Where there are two intersecting runways, both potentially with departing and arriving aircraft? Nope. But, sure, a single-runway regional airport can probably get by with a single controller.
- afavour 7mo ago
  What you just described is a long term staffing shortage.
- longislandguido 7mo ago
  Some people here coded the buttons that sometimes don't work when you check in for your flight. That makes them aviation experts. How dare you question wild assumptions.
0xy 7mo ago
LaGuardia did have a fully staffed ATC, and there's zero evidence this controller was overworked. You seem to be prematurely ascribing cause when nothing has been investigated yet.
- consumer451 7mo ago
  > LaGuardia did have a fully staffed ATC According to whom? Management, or controllers? Certainly does not seem like controllers agree: https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/
- banannaise 7mo ago
  The evidence that this controller was overworked is that practically all controllers in the US at present are overworked. As such, that should be treated as the null hypothesis, and it would require substantial evidence to show that he isn't overworked.
  - PUSH_AX 7mo ago
    I'd pay to watch someone say this in a court of law...
    - ceejayoz 7mo ago
      https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_person https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_person The concept most certainly exists.
  - Esophagus4 7mo ago
    Couldn’t we just… wait to see what FAA says before coming up with our own (entirely speculative) theories?
    - afavour 7mo ago
      Can we trust the FAA's conclusion? Its previous head had a term that didn't expire until 2028 but he resigned after pressure from Elon Musk (who didn't like that he got fined), now a Trump-friendly head has been installed. What, realistically, would be the consequences if he lied? Likely none. Government officials lying on record is an every day occurrence these days.
fyrepuffs 7mo ago
[flagged]
- nathanaldensr 7mo ago
  The FAA's problems are systemic and structural. They've existed long, long before the 2024 election.
  - Tyrubias 7mo ago
    Yes, but the problems have been driven by the relentless deregulation of critical industries and infrastructure primarily driven by a specific political bloc. In the next US election, we should vote for candidates that promise systemic change and government overhaul, not further deregulation and handouts to corporations.
  - jordanb 7mo ago
    It certainly didn't help.[1] [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-doges-cutbacks-at-the-faa-could-affect-aviation-safety https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-doges-cutbacks-at-the-...
    - annexrichmond 7mo ago
      the headline literally says "could", not that it did. can you point to evidence that DOGE cutbacks did negatively affect aviation safety, particularly with regards to ATCs?
  - nobodyandproud 7mo ago
    Mostly due to blind faith in austerity and the market, by certain groups.
  - krsw 7mo ago
    They got markedly worse after 2024. No need to minimize the damage the current administration is doing to the institutions of the country.
- 7mo ago
inaros 7mo ago
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 https://www.airlinepilotforums.com You will see many are terrified ( in commercial pilot terms...) of flying into La Guardia or JFK...
- rglover 7mo ago
  > https://www.airlinepilotforums.com/major/152572-aircraft-firetruck-hit-lga.html 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?
  - joncrane 7mo ago
    The controller was talking to Frontier plane when he first said stop, then said stopstopTruck1stopstopstop and it would be easy for there to be a gap in processing for the driver of truck 1 because the verbiage all flowed in the same stanza that was started when addressing the Frontier flight.
    - inaros 7mo ago
      I am afraid the fire truck might have some level of responsibility, since it seems FAA ground vehicle guidance says: AC No: 150/5210-20A - "Subject: Ground Vehicle Operations to include Taxiing or Towing an Aircraft on Airports" https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/150-5210-20A.pdf https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/... “you must ensure that you look both ways down the runway to visually acquire aircraft landing or departing even if you have a clearance to cross.” These trucks seem to have pretty good visibility from inside. Not sure if La Guardia model was the same: https://youtu.be/rfILwYo3sXc https://youtu.be/rfILwYo3sXc
pc86 7mo ago
> 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.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
  > One controller overnight is completely reasonable. How many fatal accidents are reasonable in your opinion?
- inaros 7mo ago
  >> One controller overnight is completely reasonable So if said controller has a medical episode?
  - pc86 7mo ago
    "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.
    - inaros 7mo ago
      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...
      - pc86 7mo ago
        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.
        7mo ago
duped 7mo ago
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.
- rekrsiv 7mo ago
  You are correct. Robustness requires a system that is working within it's tolerance margin, and stressing that inevitably leads to failure. A fault-tolerant system in this case would require a large amount of redundant humans. Unfortunately, the capitalist mindset prevents accepting any amount of "waste" as tolerable, which makes a robust system impossible to implement over time. Every system touched by a capitalist optimizer will eventually fail. The idea that waste must be reduced is killing society, and this mindset must be addressed first before any other safety-critical system can be made reliable again.
- onetokeoverthe 7mo ago
  [dead]
- fn-mote 7mo ago
  > The carriers need to eat the costs of forcing too much demand on ATCs. Running ATC (and limiting flights if necessary) seems like the job of the government to me. Why put this on the carriers?
  - 0xffff2 7mo ago
    Put the costs on the carriers, not hand the job over to them.
xeonmc 7mo ago
> 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_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_c...
- garaetjjte 7mo ago
  I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Los_Angeles_runway_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Los_Angeles_runway_collis... is more applicable.
  - onefiftymike 7mo ago
    Admiral Cloudberg has a great writeup about this. I instantly thought of LA when I saw the headlines about the LaGuardia collision. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-crash-of-usair-flight-1493-and-skywest-flight-5569-or-the-los-angeles-5d24ab5fec46 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c...
  - rectang 7mo ago
    In both cases, the controller's fate was grim. Peter Nielsen (Überlingen) was murdered by a relative of a crash victim. Robin Lee Wascher (LA), whose own parents had died in an earlier air crash, was crucified in the media and never worked as a controller again. Both precedents are applicable, because the Laguardia controller is also going to be savaged.
- aaronmdjones 7mo ago
  I also drew parallels to the Uberlingen mid-aid collision, but for a different reason. The mid-air collision occurred because the Russian air crew maneuvered contrary to their TCAS instruction (it commanded them to climb, the controller ordered them to descend). They were not trained that TCAS is the ultimate authority in this situation; it exists precisely because the controller has already failed in their separation duties, and if you have TCAS giving you a resolution advisory, your aircraft is no longer under ATC control and you must ignore any ATC instruction to the contrary. The other aircraft was correctly following its TCAS instruction (descending) because their crew was trained in this. Both planes descended and still hit each other. In this case, KLGA has RWSLs (Runway Status Lights), including RELs (Runway Entrance Lights) on taxiways, that behave like traffic lights on roads. This too is completely automated and is the last-ditch resort for when a controller has already failed in their separation duties. This system processes transponder data of nearby aircraft and determines whether an aircraft is about to take off (is on the runway and accelerating) or land (is approaching the runway and descending). In either case the RELs go red automatically, and the controller cannot override this. The driver of the ARFF probably [1] placed more emphasis on the controller's clearance to cross than the lights telling him to stay put, in exactly the same way that the Russian air crew placed more emphasis on the controller's instruction to descend than their TCAS instruction to climb, not realising that they were maneuvering contrary to the thing that exists specifically to prevent these accidents. EDIT: I am not assigning blame to the controller here. They are human, and humans make mistakes. That's why these systems exist. Having one person handle an airport the size of KLGA is an accident waiting to happen. [1] Obviously this is unknown at this point, and is something the NTSB will investigate. The system could have been down for maintenance for example.
wk_end 7mo ago
The NTSB - and aviation in general - as much as possible tries to avoid "pinning" issues on individuals. The purpose of an investigation isn't to ascribe blame, it's to try to understand what happened and how to prevent it from happening again, and prescribing "don't make mistakes" is not a realistic or useful method for preventing accidents from recurring.
- rectang 7mo ago
  Yes! But every news organization is leading with "I messed up." And the US President commented "They messed up", though it's unclear who that was in reference to. Humans have a powerful need to affix blame and punish individuals. On the internet, you are forever the worst moment of your life. We set air traffic controllers up to fail, and then when something goes wrong we torture them until they die, and then torture their memory after they die.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    The current US President is the last person we should listen to when it comes to deciding anything important.
    - rectang 7mo ago
      By using the role name rather than proper name, I'd hoped to spare HN from a tangent like this. My point doesn't rest on the nature of single individual, but instead applies to a human tendency. Politicians and press both play to the base impulses of a mass audience, unlike the NTSB. This is not the first time that a politician has scapegoated individuals when systemic failure occurs.
      - estearum 7mo ago
        I actually can't remember or imagine another POTUS even getting to a level of specificity required to scapegoat an individual for something like this. The usual (and correct) answer is to say: "We don't know yet what happened, but there will be a full investigation and we will make the changes necessary to prevent it from happening again." Pretty easy! It doesn't serve us well to act like this administration is anything other than extremely aberrational.
jliptzin 7mo ago
Is it possible to automate the job of an ATC controller? At least partially? Or at least just as a sanity check on every human decision? Not saying I want human ATC controllers replaced, but if there’s a severe staff shortage, I feel like a computerized version is better than nothing at all.
- dmitrygr 7mo ago
  No, a lot of it is human - asking for things, getting things.
- 0xffff2 7mo ago
  In this specific incident, there was a system in place called Runway Entrance Lights [0] that does serve as an automated sanity check on controllers commands. The surveillance video that is circulating shows that the system was working and indicated that the runway was not safe to enter. It's not clear yet why the truck entered the runway anyway. 0: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
  - jamincan 7mo ago
    I wonder if they thought that since they were responding to an emergency, and they were given clearance to cross by ATC, that that would override normal procedures. Kind of like how emergency vehicles cross a red light all the time when responding to an emergency.
    - AnAnonymousDude 7mo ago
      If they thought that, it was in error. Training SPECIFICALLY calls this out. The lights ALWAYS overrule the controller. Period.
      - rectang 7mo ago
        It would be interesting to know whether that rule was onerous enough in practice that they had little choice but to break it in order to do their jobs effectively. They were responding to an emergency, seconds count, and they believed they had clearance from the controller.
dmitrygr 7mo ago
NTSB's M.O. has always been that there is never just one cause. A human mistake that costs lives is never that simple. There is a system that trained the person, a set of incentives that put the person into that place, a set of safeguards that should have existed to prevent the mistake from causing life loss, and a regulatory framework to occasionally verify all of the above. I would expect that "the controller made a mistake" would be ~one paragraph in a 100-page report.
- wolrah 7mo ago
  Exactly. In the field of accident analysis and prevention the "swiss cheese model"[1] is very popular for this reason. It acknowledges that every layer of the system will have holes, and that ideally every layer when stacked up provides complete coverage. If something bad happens that means that holes every layer had to have aligned and the whole stack bears some responsibility for the outcome. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
calf 7mo ago
What structural change would permit a worker to take initiative and say "Hey, these working conditions are wrong/inadequate and I will not safely do my job today unless proper changes are made", without risk of getting fired by higher-ups? Empowering workers to make safety-critical meta-decisions does not seem to be a feature of actually-existing capitalism.
- chimeracoder 7mo ago
  > What structural change would permit a worker to take initiative and say "Hey, these working conditions are wrong/inadequate and I will not safely do my job today unless proper changes are made", without risk of getting fired by higher-ups? Well, what you are describing is a strike, and it is currently illegal for ATC to strike, so in theory one possible structural change would be to make it legal for the workers to do what you're describing.
- evan_a_a 7mo ago
  What you're describing is already well known in the aviation industry. Promotion of a positive safety culture is a key element if the Safety Management System (SMS) framework https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/sms https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/sms https://www.faa.gov/media/94731 https://www.faa.gov/media/94731
  - calf 7mo ago
    If a tree knows something but still falls then did it really know anything?
    - evan_a_a 7mo ago
      SMS is mandated by the FAA
Eufrat 7mo ago
I suspect someone is literally asking the idiotic question if they can just replace our air traffic controllers with an AI.
downrightmike 7mo ago
ATC are under contract to not be able to quit, basically high stress slavery and the gov't put the screws to them. The only thing that will fix this is the rich can't fly their private jets
- rationalist 7mo ago
  > ATC are under contract to not be able to quit, basically high stress slavery... Source? Because that isn't true; they can quit like any other civilian government job. > ...and the gov't put the screws to them. That part is true though.
GarnetFloride 7mo ago
When I was young I took a tour of an air traffic control center near New York. By the end I knew it was not for me. Everyone looked stressed. Things have gotten so much worse. This guy was doing at least 3 people's jobs even before the first emergency occurred. Then it was an inevitable cascade failure situation. It was never his fault. Management failed here. If its stupid but it works, its not stupid, is the old saying, but the reality I've seen is its still stupid but you got lucky. -Maxim 43 The luck finally ran out.
- childintime 7mo ago
  > Management failed here And who was managing here? Do we dare point the finger at Congress and the POTUS for creating the conditions necessary for this to happen? I hope the final report does point the finger. As far as politicians are concerned, accountability is for suckers.
fleroviumna 7mo ago
[dead]

by ndiddy 7mo ago

metalliqaz 7mo ago

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.

pklausler 7mo ago
"The system worked yesterday, so it should have worked forever."
FL410 7mo ago
And therein lies the problem. Clearly, having one overworked controller running a combined tower is not safe nor sustainable.
- pc86 7mo ago
  Planes landing at a rate of one every 30-40 minutes isn't exactly "overworked."
  - gortok 7mo ago
    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.
    - pc86 7mo ago
      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.
      - bombcar 7mo ago
        If you have ever spent time listening to LiveATC you will realize that like everyone, "tunnel ear" is a real thing - if United 1002 has received the clearance/instructions they expect, read them back, and are proceeding it can be moderately difficult to get their attention again, even with perfect verbiage.
      - mannykannot 7mo ago
        The controller was not guilty of malfeasance, but clearing the trucks onto the runway with an airliner on short final was a mistake, no matter whatever else one could say about it.
  - VK-pro 7mo ago
    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.
- zardo 7mo ago
  It seems like a critical enough role that you probably want two people there in case one has a medical emergency anyway. Even if it's not that busy.
  - xeromal 7mo ago
    I believe other areas can assist when something like that happens.
ryanmcbride 7mo ago
Maybe there should be more than one
- metalliqaz 7mo ago
  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.
  - RankingMember 7mo ago
    > 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.
    - thmsths 7mo ago
      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.
      - pc86 7mo ago
        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.
      - adrr 7mo ago
        Its weird that there strict laws that limit pilot hours to under 40 hours a week but no laws that restrict number of hours ATC works.
jen20 7mo ago
> 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.
- metalliqaz 7mo ago
  There are other people there, but the person on the radio is doing both.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
cjrp 7mo ago
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.
jakelazaroff 7mo ago
You are describing a staffing shortage.
- pc86 7mo ago
  "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?
  - Someone1234 7mo ago
    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.
    - volkl48 7mo ago
      It does quiet down eventually. There's no scheduled departures 22:55-5:45 and only a handful of arrivals 23:59-6:45. However, arrivals stay pretty heavy right up until 23:59 even on schedule and if you've got a lot of delayed flights (not exactly uncommon at LGA) - you may still have a lot of departures going out in the 23:00 hour. I would not be surprised to learn that they're staffed to an appropriate level for what the schedule says is supposed to be operating at that time, but a very inadequate level for what actually winds up operating at that time on many days. Initial analysis suggests they were running about 75% of full capacity in flight ops in the 15min prior to the accident. I doubt they were staffed to 75% of the daytime peak.
  - alistairSH 7mo ago
    You can't think of any scenario having one controller makes sense? At one of the nation's busiest airports? Where there are two intersecting runways, both potentially with departing and arriving aircraft? Nope. But, sure, a single-runway regional airport can probably get by with a single controller.
afavour 7mo ago
What you just described is a long term staffing shortage.
longislandguido 7mo ago
Some people here coded the buttons that sometimes don't work when you check in for your flight. That makes them aviation experts. How dare you question wild assumptions.

0xy 7mo ago

LaGuardia did have a fully staffed ATC, and there's zero evidence this controller was overworked. You seem to be prematurely ascribing cause when nothing has been investigated yet.

consumer451 7mo ago
> LaGuardia did have a fully staffed ATC According to whom? Management, or controllers? Certainly does not seem like controllers agree: https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/
banannaise 7mo ago
The evidence that this controller was overworked is that practically all controllers in the US at present are overworked. As such, that should be treated as the null hypothesis, and it would require substantial evidence to show that he isn't overworked.
- PUSH_AX 7mo ago
  I'd pay to watch someone say this in a court of law...
  - ceejayoz 7mo ago
    https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_person https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/reasonable_person The concept most certainly exists.
- Esophagus4 7mo ago
  Couldn’t we just… wait to see what FAA says before coming up with our own (entirely speculative) theories?
  - afavour 7mo ago
    Can we trust the FAA's conclusion? Its previous head had a term that didn't expire until 2028 but he resigned after pressure from Elon Musk (who didn't like that he got fined), now a Trump-friendly head has been installed. What, realistically, would be the consequences if he lied? Likely none. Government officials lying on record is an every day occurrence these days.

fyrepuffs 7mo ago

[flagged]

nathanaldensr 7mo ago
The FAA's problems are systemic and structural. They've existed long, long before the 2024 election.
- Tyrubias 7mo ago
  Yes, but the problems have been driven by the relentless deregulation of critical industries and infrastructure primarily driven by a specific political bloc. In the next US election, we should vote for candidates that promise systemic change and government overhaul, not further deregulation and handouts to corporations.
- jordanb 7mo ago
  It certainly didn't help.[1] [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-doges-cutbacks-at-the-faa-could-affect-aviation-safety https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-doges-cutbacks-at-the-...
  - annexrichmond 7mo ago
    the headline literally says "could", not that it did. can you point to evidence that DOGE cutbacks did negatively affect aviation safety, particularly with regards to ATCs?
- nobodyandproud 7mo ago
  Mostly due to blind faith in austerity and the market, by certain groups.
- krsw 7mo ago
  They got markedly worse after 2024. No need to minimize the damage the current administration is doing to the institutions of the country.
7mo ago

inaros 7mo ago

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 https://www.airlinepilotforums.com You will see many are terrified ( in commercial pilot terms...) of flying into La Guardia or JFK...

rglover 7mo ago
> https://www.airlinepilotforums.com/major/152572-aircraft-firetruck-hit-lga.html 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?
- joncrane 7mo ago
  The controller was talking to Frontier plane when he first said stop, then said stopstopTruck1stopstopstop and it would be easy for there to be a gap in processing for the driver of truck 1 because the verbiage all flowed in the same stanza that was started when addressing the Frontier flight.
  - inaros 7mo ago
    I am afraid the fire truck might have some level of responsibility, since it seems FAA ground vehicle guidance says: AC No: 150/5210-20A - "Subject: Ground Vehicle Operations to include Taxiing or Towing an Aircraft on Airports" https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/150-5210-20A.pdf https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/... “you must ensure that you look both ways down the runway to visually acquire aircraft landing or departing even if you have a clearance to cross.” These trucks seem to have pretty good visibility from inside. Not sure if La Guardia model was the same: https://youtu.be/rfILwYo3sXc https://youtu.be/rfILwYo3sXc

pc86 7mo ago

> 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.

MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
> One controller overnight is completely reasonable. How many fatal accidents are reasonable in your opinion?
inaros 7mo ago
>> One controller overnight is completely reasonable So if said controller has a medical episode?
- pc86 7mo ago
  "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.
  - inaros 7mo ago
    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...
    - pc86 7mo ago
      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.
      - 7mo ago

duped 7mo ago

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.

rekrsiv 7mo ago
You are correct. Robustness requires a system that is working within it's tolerance margin, and stressing that inevitably leads to failure. A fault-tolerant system in this case would require a large amount of redundant humans. Unfortunately, the capitalist mindset prevents accepting any amount of "waste" as tolerable, which makes a robust system impossible to implement over time. Every system touched by a capitalist optimizer will eventually fail. The idea that waste must be reduced is killing society, and this mindset must be addressed first before any other safety-critical system can be made reliable again.
onetokeoverthe 7mo ago
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fn-mote 7mo ago
> The carriers need to eat the costs of forcing too much demand on ATCs. Running ATC (and limiting flights if necessary) seems like the job of the government to me. Why put this on the carriers?
- 0xffff2 7mo ago
  Put the costs on the carriers, not hand the job over to them.

xeonmc 7mo ago

> 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_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_c...

garaetjjte 7mo ago
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Los_Angeles_runway_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Los_Angeles_runway_collis... is more applicable.
- onefiftymike 7mo ago
  Admiral Cloudberg has a great writeup about this. I instantly thought of LA when I saw the headlines about the LaGuardia collision. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-crash-of-usair-flight-1493-and-skywest-flight-5569-or-the-los-angeles-5d24ab5fec46 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c...
- rectang 7mo ago
  In both cases, the controller's fate was grim. Peter Nielsen (Überlingen) was murdered by a relative of a crash victim. Robin Lee Wascher (LA), whose own parents had died in an earlier air crash, was crucified in the media and never worked as a controller again. Both precedents are applicable, because the Laguardia controller is also going to be savaged.
aaronmdjones 7mo ago
I also drew parallels to the Uberlingen mid-aid collision, but for a different reason. The mid-air collision occurred because the Russian air crew maneuvered contrary to their TCAS instruction (it commanded them to climb, the controller ordered them to descend). They were not trained that TCAS is the ultimate authority in this situation; it exists precisely because the controller has already failed in their separation duties, and if you have TCAS giving you a resolution advisory, your aircraft is no longer under ATC control and you must ignore any ATC instruction to the contrary. The other aircraft was correctly following its TCAS instruction (descending) because their crew was trained in this. Both planes descended and still hit each other. In this case, KLGA has RWSLs (Runway Status Lights), including RELs (Runway Entrance Lights) on taxiways, that behave like traffic lights on roads. This too is completely automated and is the last-ditch resort for when a controller has already failed in their separation duties. This system processes transponder data of nearby aircraft and determines whether an aircraft is about to take off (is on the runway and accelerating) or land (is approaching the runway and descending). In either case the RELs go red automatically, and the controller cannot override this. The driver of the ARFF probably [1] placed more emphasis on the controller's clearance to cross than the lights telling him to stay put, in exactly the same way that the Russian air crew placed more emphasis on the controller's instruction to descend than their TCAS instruction to climb, not realising that they were maneuvering contrary to the thing that exists specifically to prevent these accidents. EDIT: I am not assigning blame to the controller here. They are human, and humans make mistakes. That's why these systems exist. Having one person handle an airport the size of KLGA is an accident waiting to happen. [1] Obviously this is unknown at this point, and is something the NTSB will investigate. The system could have been down for maintenance for example.

wk_end 7mo ago

The NTSB - and aviation in general - as much as possible tries to avoid "pinning" issues on individuals. The purpose of an investigation isn't to ascribe blame, it's to try to understand what happened and how to prevent it from happening again, and prescribing "don't make mistakes" is not a realistic or useful method for preventing accidents from recurring.

rectang 7mo ago
Yes! But every news organization is leading with "I messed up." And the US President commented "They messed up", though it's unclear who that was in reference to. Humans have a powerful need to affix blame and punish individuals. On the internet, you are forever the worst moment of your life. We set air traffic controllers up to fail, and then when something goes wrong we torture them until they die, and then torture their memory after they die.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  The current US President is the last person we should listen to when it comes to deciding anything important.
  - rectang 7mo ago
    By using the role name rather than proper name, I'd hoped to spare HN from a tangent like this. My point doesn't rest on the nature of single individual, but instead applies to a human tendency. Politicians and press both play to the base impulses of a mass audience, unlike the NTSB. This is not the first time that a politician has scapegoated individuals when systemic failure occurs.
    - estearum 7mo ago
      I actually can't remember or imagine another POTUS even getting to a level of specificity required to scapegoat an individual for something like this. The usual (and correct) answer is to say: "We don't know yet what happened, but there will be a full investigation and we will make the changes necessary to prevent it from happening again." Pretty easy! It doesn't serve us well to act like this administration is anything other than extremely aberrational.

jliptzin 7mo ago

Is it possible to automate the job of an ATC controller? At least partially? Or at least just as a sanity check on every human decision? Not saying I want human ATC controllers replaced, but if there’s a severe staff shortage, I feel like a computerized version is better than nothing at all.

dmitrygr 7mo ago
No, a lot of it is human - asking for things, getting things.
0xffff2 7mo ago
In this specific incident, there was a system in place called Runway Entrance Lights [0] that does serve as an automated sanity check on controllers commands. The surveillance video that is circulating shows that the system was working and indicated that the runway was not safe to enter. It's not clear yet why the truck entered the runway anyway. 0: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
- jamincan 7mo ago
  I wonder if they thought that since they were responding to an emergency, and they were given clearance to cross by ATC, that that would override normal procedures. Kind of like how emergency vehicles cross a red light all the time when responding to an emergency.
  - AnAnonymousDude 7mo ago
    If they thought that, it was in error. Training SPECIFICALLY calls this out. The lights ALWAYS overrule the controller. Period.
    - rectang 7mo ago
      It would be interesting to know whether that rule was onerous enough in practice that they had little choice but to break it in order to do their jobs effectively. They were responding to an emergency, seconds count, and they believed they had clearance from the controller.

dmitrygr 7mo ago

NTSB's M.O. has always been that there is never just one cause. A human mistake that costs lives is never that simple. There is a system that trained the person, a set of incentives that put the person into that place, a set of safeguards that should have existed to prevent the mistake from causing life loss, and a regulatory framework to occasionally verify all of the above. I would expect that "the controller made a mistake" would be ~one paragraph in a 100-page report.

wolrah 7mo ago
Exactly. In the field of accident analysis and prevention the "swiss cheese model"[1] is very popular for this reason. It acknowledges that every layer of the system will have holes, and that ideally every layer when stacked up provides complete coverage. If something bad happens that means that holes every layer had to have aligned and the whole stack bears some responsibility for the outcome. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

calf 7mo ago

What structural change would permit a worker to take initiative and say "Hey, these working conditions are wrong/inadequate and I will not safely do my job today unless proper changes are made", without risk of getting fired by higher-ups? Empowering workers to make safety-critical meta-decisions does not seem to be a feature of actually-existing capitalism.

chimeracoder 7mo ago
> What structural change would permit a worker to take initiative and say "Hey, these working conditions are wrong/inadequate and I will not safely do my job today unless proper changes are made", without risk of getting fired by higher-ups? Well, what you are describing is a strike, and it is currently illegal for ATC to strike, so in theory one possible structural change would be to make it legal for the workers to do what you're describing.
evan_a_a 7mo ago
What you're describing is already well known in the aviation industry. Promotion of a positive safety culture is a key element if the Safety Management System (SMS) framework https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/sms https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/sms https://www.faa.gov/media/94731 https://www.faa.gov/media/94731
- calf 7mo ago
  If a tree knows something but still falls then did it really know anything?
  - evan_a_a 7mo ago
    SMS is mandated by the FAA

Eufrat 7mo ago

I suspect someone is literally asking the idiotic question if they can just replace our air traffic controllers with an AI.

downrightmike 7mo ago

ATC are under contract to not be able to quit, basically high stress slavery and the gov't put the screws to them. The only thing that will fix this is the rich can't fly their private jets

rationalist 7mo ago
> ATC are under contract to not be able to quit, basically high stress slavery... Source? Because that isn't true; they can quit like any other civilian government job. > ...and the gov't put the screws to them. That part is true though.

GarnetFloride 7mo ago

When I was young I took a tour of an air traffic control center near New York. By the end I knew it was not for me. Everyone looked stressed. Things have gotten so much worse. This guy was doing at least 3 people's jobs even before the first emergency occurred. Then it was an inevitable cascade failure situation. It was never his fault. Management failed here. If its stupid but it works, its not stupid, is the old saying, but the reality I've seen is its still stupid but you got lucky. -Maxim 43 The luck finally ran out.

childintime 7mo ago
> Management failed here And who was managing here? Do we dare point the finger at Congress and the POTUS for creating the conditions necessary for this to happen? I hope the final report does point the finger. As far as politicians are concerned, accountability is for suckers.

fleroviumna 7mo ago

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