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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.
by 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 agoAnd therein lies the problem. Clearly, having one overworked controller running a combined tower is not safe nor sustainable.
- pc86 7mo agoPlanes landing at a rate of one every 30-40 minutes isn't exactly "overworked."
- gortok 7mo agoIn 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 agoWhich 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 agoIf 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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.
- pc86 7mo agoAlmost every night there are 6-7 hours with zero or near-zero scheduled departures and very few scheduled arrivals. The controller shortage has nothing to do with pay, controllers make a lot of money.
- bdamm 7mo ago12am-5am is very quiet, at about 1 per hour. But the accident happened during the 10pm-12am time slot, which is not as busy as other times of day, but can still have workload spikes as evidenced by this situation. ATC should never work alone at any of the "Core 30" airports. https://www.aspm.faa.gov/aspmhelp/index/Core_30.html https://www.aspm.faa.gov/aspmhelp/index/Core_30.html
- SteveNuts 7mo agoWhat is the contingency/continuity plan if the single controller becomes incapacitated while on duty with no warning to pilots?
- bombcar 7mo agoSame as if the radios stopped working or otherwise communication fails. Execute the planned procedures (which vary). Often Approach will take over the "tower" and operate in crippled mode (no clearances to cross active runways, you must go down to the end kind of thing). Some airports are uncontrolled at various times and would revert to that. Some airlines would require the pilot execute a missed approach and deviate to a towered airport, others may allow them to land.
- zardo 7mo agoIt 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 agoI believe other areas can assist when something like that happens.
- ryanmcbride 7mo agoMaybe there should be more than one
- metalliqaz 7mo agoMaybe. 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 agoThere 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 agoIt 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 agoIts 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 agoThere are other people there, but the person on the radio is doing both.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- cjrp 7mo agoThat 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 agoYou 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 agoIn 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 agoIt 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 agoYou 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 agoWhat you just described is a long term staffing shortage.
- longislandguido 7mo agoSome 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.