This small mistake (and it is initially small, just catastrophic) is a system breakdown, not necessarily a staffing breakdown. Though staffing is definitely a wider issue in the NAS.
Edit to add: looking at this incident closer it appears LGA was busy enough to make a single tower/ground controller an obviously bad plan. Still, systemically, there's enough low hanging fruit here, like ADSb in for the airport trucks or hold short line guard lights. I hope the takeaway isn't just "don't have controllers make mistakes".
Lots of pilots here have been complaining for years about how the US controllers are so much better, they can handle much more traffic, etc.
Edit:- It's Atlanta.
The airspace that combines JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark, is the busiest airspace in the US.
Should they be combined at LGA when both (crossing) runways are in use, and there's an incident on the field? (The fire trucks were on their way to investigate a smell on the flight deck of another airplane that had to abort takeoff twice.)
I'd say hell no.
The obvious problem is what happens when operations become abnormal. ATC shouldn't be staffed for normal operations, because then abnormal operations lead to catastrophe. Welcome to last night: the weather is bad, which causes a plane to abort two takeoffs, which causes that plane to need emergency services. This increases the controller's workload beyond his capacity, so he accidentally clears the emergency vehicle to cross in front of a landing airplane, and they can't see the airplane because the weather is bad, so they follow the instruction and promptly get hit with an airplane.
When some bad weather can be the difference between "this is fine, one controller can handle it" and two dead pilots, you need to be staffed for bad weather.
Which means either the compensation is insufficient to attract and retain the necessary number of qualified individuals, or the FAA lacks the resources to train an appropriate number of qualified individuals. Either way, it's about money.
That staffing problem mostly comes down to it being demanding work that's poorly compensated for the amount of skill and education and stress involved; there are high hiring standards, you can't work past 56, and you can't even get started if you're past 31. If you're interested in aviation, you can make far more money as a pilot and it's a much more pleasant job; why would anyone become an ATC?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_New_York_(...
No you're not.
In the state of New York, the most it could possibly be divided down is by 32.
And that only in the case that ATC are distributed to towered facilities equally whether commercial or simple public-use. Which we both know they are not.
And I'll do you a really big favor and not even mention the fact that there are wayyy more than 260 ATC in New York state. Again, I was just being friendly to your view. I strongly suspect that you are also aware that there are well over 1000.
LGA is open 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Of course this is an extreme over-simplification, but if LGA only had eight ATC at their disposal total it's easy to see - or at least, much easier to see than if your working number is 260 - how they might have only one guy available to work Tower/Ground on a night shift. Please bear in mind that there's more to ATC in an airspace like NYC's than just Tower/Ground, and that ATC need regular breaks. Maybe they had two people but no redundancy, so one guy was covering both tasks during a break?
Which is exactly the practice that needs to stop.
You and I both know there are far more than 8 ATC controllers that work LGA. Please don't try to assert that there was no way to even have a relief available. (As appears to be the case in this instance.)
Whatever caused the lack of availability that night needs to be urgently addressed. Please don't try to tell me we would have needed to train more ATC controllers to provide even a single relief at that tower last night. We both know how many ATC work LGA so we both know that's not true.
What caused the lack of availability is the well-documented understaffing. Everyone in aviation knows that ATC is understaffed right now, and the reasons for the understaffing are well-understood. To come in and instead say, "well, I'm a mathematician, I'm going to make some simplifying assumptions - the only simplifying assumptions permitted - and do some basic arithmetic to show that there were hundreds of controllers available, clearly the guys responsible for ATC at LaGuardia don't know as much about running an airport safely as me" is beyond silly.
Your math is based on incorrect assumptions -- the well-documented ATC shortage actually exists.
32.
Let's assume only 260 ATC for 32 towers. (Not true, but again, we're being friendly to the conspiracy nuts.) We'll further assume every tower is staffed equally. (Also not true, but again, friendly to the nuts.)
8 Controllers for each tower if those assumptions were true. Which they are not.
Why is one controller on duty in a commercial airport? Not a public-use airport, a commercial airport?
Please stop with the BS.
But now that I know that you know a bit about ATC. Let's drop the pretense.
We're both fully aware that there are right around 1250 ATC controllers in New York state. I further suspect that both of us know exactly how many work LGA. So there's no need to speak in generalities any longer.
It's time to get serious about determining what happened in this instance. It appears, from the initial available information, that there was not even a relief on site.
That practice needs to stop, and please don't try to tell me we don't have the available staff to bring it to an end. You and I both know that's horse manure.
The FAA has been playing catch up with training enough ATCs to meet demand ever since, which isn't helped by a sequence of bad decisions made regarding ATC training schools.
All the Newsweek article says is that a lawsuit was filed. It doesn’t support GP’s claim that the FAA made “an impossible test, and gave black people the answers.” A lawsuit isn’t evidence of wrongdoing; it’s only evidence of an accusation of wrongdoing.
Looking at the front page of 2 of those domains ( tracingwoodgrains, blockedandreported ) they are ... ah .. not exactly impartial. Sample headlines: "How Wikipedia Whitewashes Mao - The Anatomy of Ideological Capture" and "The Politics of Misery - Why are young liberals so depressed".
The simpleflying link reports merely that a lawsuit was filed. It gives the name of the person filing the lawsuit as this character: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Laxalt who is also ... not exactly impartial, seeing as he "was the Republican party nominee for governor of Nevada in the 2018 election". And as other searches suggest, no stranger to frivolous litigation or false claims.
In summary, spending 5 minutes digging into it gives every impression of it being confected culture war nonsense.
"The lawsuit doesn’t allege incompetent controllers were hired instead of CTI graduates. Instead, it states that the CTI graduates weren’t given the opportunity to demonstrate their competency."
It sounds like they hired different people, rather than fewer.
Your comment presuming it was at best neutral, and any likely change was for the worse is exactly what racism looks like.
The emergency vehicle was told to stop and did not. Even a dozen ATC wouldn't have helped in that case.
Watch the video.
Other trucks slow down, but truck 1 does not even try to slow down. I'd also argue that driving so quickly that you cannot maintain control is its own problem. Getting to an emergency 20 seconds later almost never matters as much as arriving safely.
I remember late last year, couple of months ago, US ATC controllers were without pay but forced to work anyways (similar to TSA I suppose, although I don't think they were forced, but volunteered to work without salary), is that still the situation? Couldn't find any updates about that the situation been resolved, nor any updates that it's ongoing, if so though it feels like it'd be related to the amount of available controllers.
But no, AIUI only things that were somehow deemed part of "Homeland Security" are frozen, the TSA are part of Homeland Security but the ATC are under the FAA. So this particular partial government funding lapse wasn't causal, at least directly.
So why the fuck would any talented individual choose to go work for the "Get an example made out of you" department, on top of the horrific stress of the actual job!?
The idea of a union that "isn't allowed" to strike is a joke. Next will be a union that has a max membership of 1!
It's a mess.
- Another plane was out of position, grabbing some attention of the controller
- Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
- The colliding plane didn't have "explicit" landing clearance, but a "follow previous plane and land the same way unless told otherwise" implicit landing clearance. In Europe, planes need an explicit landing clearance, the act of granting it may have brought attention to the runway contention. US implicit system (arguably) is a bit more efficient, debate will now be is it worth it (pilots are now required to read back instructions because of past blood... will this result in same thing?)
- This was around midnight and apparently a little foggy, making visual contacts harder
Remember folks, disasters like this are rarely caused by a single factor. NTSB reports are excellent post-mortems that look at all contributing factors and analyze how they compounded into failure. Be human here.
"Jazz 646, number 2, cleared to land 4."
The controller said “truck 1 stop” that is not ambiguous.
"stop stop stop, truck 1 stop stop stop" I mean maybe it was ambiguous for half a second but he pretty quickly said "truck 1 stop". I guess we'll have to wait for the sync up to see if it was too late to stop by then
Sharp contrast with Europeans
From pilot friends, in best case I would say a big “depends” in some countries are very unprofessional, in others very professional (anyway total unfair generalization). There were already accidents because of that, for example because the twr communicated with locals in non english, so not everybody was at the same page.