Hacker News

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.

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.

1: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c...

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

> 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?

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

No, a lot of it is human - asking for things, getting things.

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Los_Angeles_runway_collis... is more applicable.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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/

The parent post was unjustly flagged for no other reason than facts make overly emotional people here squirm with anger. Pathetic and lame.

This is worthy of losing flagging privileges IMO.

The Secretary of Transportation said on record at the first press conference that reports this guy was working alone in the tower are INACCURATE. The actual number is the responsibility of the NTSB to disclose.

95% of this discussion is people blowing smoke out of their ass as per usual.

You are describing a staffing shortage.

And therein lies the problem. Clearly, having one overworked controller running a combined tower is not safe nor sustainable.

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.

What you just described is a long term staffing shortage.

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.

Maybe there should be more than one

> 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.

"The system worked yesterday, so it should have worked forever."

Approximately one per minute in the 15 minute span proceeding this crash, including one that had an emergency takeoff rejection and was being maneuvered along with the emergency support vehicles that were being sent to attend to it

>> One controller overnight is completely reasonable

So if said controller has a medical episode?

Normally? Zero. LGA has a curfew from midnight to six AM, April 5-December 31.

In practice? It depends. Delays have a tendency to cascade in the air travel system and the Port Authority can curtail or cancel the curfew at their discretion. How frequently do exceptions to normal ops have to happen for it to be unreasonable to use "normal ops traffic" as a justification for scheduling a single controller? Ultimately, controllers have to control the traffic that they get, not the traffic that they want/expect to get, and a system that is overly optimized becomes brittle and unable to deal with exceptions to the norm.

Can a single human being reliably and robustly maintain a safety-critical system alone under any circumstances, ever?

Ever?

Looking at the things he needs to juggle at the same time, is it really reasonable? Any standard we are referring here? Sure such cases are rare but that's why we have redundancies for critical positions.

> One controller overnight is completely reasonable.

How many fatal accidents are reasonable in your opinion?

> One controller overnight is completely reasonable.

Do you really think it's appropriate to have zero margin for handling unusually high ATC workloads? Because we just saw what happens when you have zero margin for handling unusually high ATC workloads: people start dying.

>This isn't one guy's fault.

Counterpoint. It's Regen's fault. He's the guy who decided that a high priority of the government was making sure air traffic controllers had no power to fight back against being horrifically overworked (because unions are evil you see)

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.

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

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.

You are absolulety right, the blockchain could have prevented this accident

You don't need modern AI; you can build a system that does voice recognition, models the airport and airspace, and applies looks for violations.

Actually, you might be able to try this. Live ATC and radar is available.

RWSL were red in the video. https://viewfromthewing.com/__trashed-13/ So maybe we'll be looking at training and fatigue for the firefighters too

The description is a bit vague, but I guess this should've automatically caught the landing plane immediately after it got the approval and started landing?

> When activated, these red lights indicate that ... there is an aircraft on final approach within the activation area

In the video it looks as if the other emergency vehicles have stopped and only the first truck is driving. Maybe they missed the light or it turned red just after the first truck passed the light.

A runway light does not physically prevent a vehicle from entering a restricted area in the same way that an interlock would. Not saying it’s practical but an interlock would have indeed prevented an accident of this type.

A quick Google gives me that a 737 typically lands between 144 and 180 mph. I think that's quite a lot faster than most people are watching out for. Good news is they are bigger than cars and so easier to spot at a distance but I'm still skeptical that "look before you cross the runway" is sufficiently safe. Keep in mind that the planes may not even be on the ground yet - at the top end in 30s they could go from a 1.5 miles away in the sky (and up to 300-400ft in the air) to plowing through your position (iirc runways are about 2 miles long for jets).

I wonder if it'd even be reliable to see such a plane coming fast enough.

Now multiply that by the dozens of planes in your vicinity, and by the 100ish big US airports.

Was the 2nd plane on a runway still also?