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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look, if you were to review my comment history you would have no doubt about where I stand on the current administration.
But scapegoating any single politician for the systemic problems of aviation is as unhelpful as scapegoating the controller for the crash at Laguardia.
I’ll scapegoat a single politician. Ronald Reagan - he owns 100% of the responsibility for the current state of things when he refused to negotiate better working conditions in 1981. The entire US is still feeling the aftermath.
This is not true. Aviation in the US has problems because of the tendency for safety regulators to do CYA when making decisions instead of adopting new technology.
Leaded gasoline? Illegal to use in the US - unless you're putting it into an old plane, where it's not likely legal to put unleaded in.
ATC? Done with old radar screens and physical cards.
Ground Control? Someone has to be standing in the tower with a pair of binoculars.
The US has an extremely safe aviation system, but the price for that safety has been technological stagnation. If I spend $70k on a small airplane, the best that'll get me is a 1975 Piper with a lawnmower engine and analog gauges. Replacing those with digital instruments will run ~$20k - the instruments themselves are only $7k, but the regulatory burden is quite pricey.
Reagan didn't do the US any favors when he treated ATC as disposable, but the truth is that the volume of flights has increased enormously and the job of ATC has gotten much harder while at the same time controller staffing has been screwed by budget fights in Congress and a couple years of one very misguided DEI policy.
The US needs to automate more of ATC. Human beings should be dedicated to emergencies, not issuing the exact same clearance 300 times a day.
It is absolutely true. I stated that Reagan is the reason that ATC are overworked and underpaid.
You proceeded to list a bunch of things that have absolutely nothing to do with ATC being overworked and underpaid.
"Automating more of ATC" would change absolutely nothing about the fact they're overworked and underpaid, there would just be fewer controllers with the same workload because they lost all ability to collectively bargain with Reagan.
Name an industry that has automated, and the end result was they kept the same number of employees, but paid them more and reduced their hours. Oh, and it can't be a unionized industry. I'll wait patiently wait for that list.
Your belief is that no other politician in the next half century has had any responsibility for the state of ATC today? No politicians in that time could have increased their pay or increased recruiting and staffing numbers?
I didn’t see anyone scapegoating him for anything other than engaging in direct personal attribution which is counter to aviation safety culture, basic leadership principles, and minimum decorum standards ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agreed. Respect and decorum are gone with the most recent POTUS. It's not okay to ascribe this aviation incident to the ATC controller. However, it is fully okay to call the POTUS and staff out for attacking so many individuals, at such a deeply personal level, over issues that are clearly systematic and that have clearly gotten worse under current leadership.
Sure but most of his predecessors knew enough to not weigh in beyond regret for the tragedy and loss of life until after the investigators did their job.
Indeed. Similar accident (USAir 1493/Skywest 5569) shows that thinking exactly.[1] Was easy to pin on the controller, they went far beyond that in their analysis. Almost always impressed with the professionalism of those organizations. I sometimes wonder how software would look if we had such investigations for major incidents.
I hope it comes down to the NTSB recommending more controllers (or better conditions for controllers) to avoid task saturation, not just more process. It's incredible what a single controller is capable of doing, but for major areas like NYC, it's not enough.
Understand what happened and prevent it from happening again, so long as this can be done without expanding staffing, reducing OT, structural change, etc
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
"... 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
There 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.
No 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.
With 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?
To 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.
> 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.
"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.
I 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.
> 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.
I 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.
Everybody 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.
It 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.
> 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'.
Fast, 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).
Does 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.
310 comments
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.
Pretty easy!
It doesn't serve us well to act like this administration is anything other than extremely aberrational.
But scapegoating any single politician for the systemic problems of aviation is as unhelpful as scapegoating the controller for the crash at Laguardia.
Leaded gasoline? Illegal to use in the US - unless you're putting it into an old plane, where it's not likely legal to put unleaded in.
ATC? Done with old radar screens and physical cards.
Ground Control? Someone has to be standing in the tower with a pair of binoculars.
The US has an extremely safe aviation system, but the price for that safety has been technological stagnation. If I spend $70k on a small airplane, the best that'll get me is a 1975 Piper with a lawnmower engine and analog gauges. Replacing those with digital instruments will run ~$20k - the instruments themselves are only $7k, but the regulatory burden is quite pricey.
Reagan didn't do the US any favors when he treated ATC as disposable, but the truth is that the volume of flights has increased enormously and the job of ATC has gotten much harder while at the same time controller staffing has been screwed by budget fights in Congress and a couple years of one very misguided DEI policy.
The US needs to automate more of ATC. Human beings should be dedicated to emergencies, not issuing the exact same clearance 300 times a day.
You proceeded to list a bunch of things that have absolutely nothing to do with ATC being overworked and underpaid.
"Automating more of ATC" would change absolutely nothing about the fact they're overworked and underpaid, there would just be fewer controllers with the same workload because they lost all ability to collectively bargain with Reagan.
Name an industry that has automated, and the end result was they kept the same number of employees, but paid them more and reduced their hours. Oh, and it can't be a unionized industry. I'll wait patiently wait for that list.
Is it still an aberration the second time 'round?
1: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c...
The NTSB only makes recommendations.
https://www.airlinepilotforums.com
You will see many are terrified ( in commercial pilot terms...) of flying into La Guardia or JFK...
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.
> 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_c...
Empowering workers to make safety-critical meta-decisions does not seem to be a feature of actually-existing capitalism.
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.
> 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.
"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
Currently over 41% of facilities are reliant on mandatory overtime, with controllers frequently working 60-hour weeks with only four days off per month.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKjBCEubtBI
> 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.
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.
When did this lunacy become an arguable position?
>
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
> 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.
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.
The US is just in an active state of collapse in many areas, including air travel.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking
> 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'.