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.
12am-5am is very quiet, at about 1 per hour. But the accident happened during the 10pm-12am time slot, which is not as busy as other times of day, but can still have workload spikes as evidenced by this situation.
In this case there were two arrivals within 4 minutes of each other and two departures, in addition to the emergency plane that had just aborted takeoff.
Which is a completely reasonable amount of traffic for one controller to handle. This wasn't the controller's fault. The firetruck received a clearance, had that clearance revoked, and either didn't hear the revocation or ignored it.
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.
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.
Same 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.
Counterpoint. It's Regen's fault. He's the guy who decided that a high priority of the government was making sure air traffic controllers had no power to fight back against being horrifically overworked (because unions are evil you see)
Wasn't it Congress who passed 5 U.S.C. § 7311. which says a person may not “accept or hold” a federal job if they “participate in a strike” against the U.S. government.
They were striking for less outdated tools, improving staffing levels, and other safety improvements. The solution was to give them the things they wanted.
I’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.
This 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...
You don't need a union to have effective management. It should also be their incentive not to cause people's death by overworking employees. Which is also dumb because it costs more to overwork then hire appropriately with overtime laws... cops exploit this all the time to steal money from taxpayers. (The ones in Seattle only get caught when they accidently charge over 24 hours of overtime in a day)
Union rules that say only a particular classification of employee is allowed to pick up a small package from a loading dock and move it twenty feet are also bad.
The blame can go to the top, for not managing correctly.
If 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).
Yes, they should all have taken actions. But also, it is much more difficult to fix something broken once the damage has settled in. I guess none of them was willing to risk the disruption a fix would have caused. And the system seemed to have held up for quite a while. Weren't there some mass firings of ATC personal at the beginning of the Trump presidency?
The bottom line is: don't break things that are difficult or impossible to fix.
Absolutely. 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.
It 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?
When I heard about the crash I immediately recalled the recent articles about ATC shortages and overworked ATC's. And here we are. ONE dude running ATC for LaGuardia. Mind boggling.
I place no blame on the ATC as they were doing everything they could given the shit sandwich they were handed. I see this happening all over with staffs getting pared down to minimums, more (sometimes unpaid) over time, prices going up, and no raises.
I’m not trying to minimize a tragedy, but maybe this is almost the perfect wake up call?
Not many fatalities but nevertheless a spectacular collision. At a major hub airport in a major city. It’s hard to look away from, the cause is obvious, and all that without hundreds of deaths.
It'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.
Agreed. There are a whole bucketload of problems, each one contributing to the staff shortage. The US has problems that other countries don't have (or have less of). It's a long-term organisational issue. None of it is insurmountable, but things need to be done differently, and the politics of that may be insurmountable.
Being an air-traffic controller anywhere in the world is a very intense job at times, and needs a huge amount of proficiency that only a small number of people are capable of doing. Couple that with:
- the FAA expects you to move to where ATCs are needed, so many of the qualified applicants give up when they hear where the posting is. You can't force them to take the job!
- the technology is decades out of date and the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (it's seriously called that) won't roll out until 2028 at the earliest
- Obama's FAA disincentivised its traditional "feeder" colleges that do ATC courses to "promote diversity", net outcome was fewer applicants
- Regan broke the union in the 1980s
- DOGE indiscriminately decimated the FAA like it did most other government departments
> 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.
This 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?
I actually looked into becoming an ATC controller a year or two ago (I love aviation) and they had an age cap of ~30 to start training. I'm 32, so ruled out.
> (b) An operator of a vehicle on a roadway moving more slowly than the normal speed of other vehicles at the time and place under the existing conditions shall drive in the right-hand lane available for vehicles, or as close as practicable to the
right-hand curb or edge of the roadway, unless the operator is:
> (1) passing another vehicle; or
> (2) preparing for a left turn at an intersection or into a private road or driveway.
Note this law specifically mentions "normal speed of other vehicles at the time and place" and doesn't directly mention speed limits. So by the text of this law, if you're driving the speed limit and hanging out in the left lane while the normal speed at that time is like 10 over you're technically breaking this law.
We have specific signage for highways where this is supposed to be the law.
This is a huge milestone, and everyone at Garmin who worked on Autoland should be patting themselves on the back, they saved some lives today and will undoubtedly save more. Amazing technology.
That’s not how it works, like at all. Private airports don’t have controllers, and the ones I presume you are thinking of (smaller PUBLIC airports) the controllers are either employed or funded by the FAA.
This is literally the worst part of Gemini. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if, and if so what, they are training on even with my stupid $250/mo subscription. It's totally opaque.
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