Which, as a non informed person but someone who needs to travel by plane, sounds absolutely insane. Was it always possible to staff that with a single person or is that a result of understaffing?
As an informed person (PPL flying single engine into smallish towered airports all the time), it is absolutely insane for an airport the size of LGA. Occasionally, you will encounter one guy doing tower and ground at very small class D airports or during not-so-busy shifts.
To play devil's advocate, ASEL into small deltas is significantly different than receiving full-stop IFRs late at night.
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".
Yea, if you listen to the ATC audio, you can hear that in addition to the normal high workload of handling both ground and tower, this guy had an emergency aircraft on a taxiway to deal with, too. A lot of holes in the swiss cheese lined up, but one of them clearly is ATC workload.
Even with multiple staff - the ATC person clearing you to drive across the runway should be the same ATC person doing takeoff / landings on that runway.
The audio sounds unsure when giving the clearance - but possibly hindsight ears at work.
I fly out of a small-to-medium-sized airport in Canada and I've never seen it happen there. The idea of one person being responsible for both tower and ground in the busiest airspace in the US is absolute insanity.
YVR has had flow control every day for years now, and closes the class C to VFR traffic on virtually any sunny day now, due to staffing problems. It's been happening since long before COVID, but that made it much worse. The controllers simply refuse to take on more traffic than they can safely handle.
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.
Understaffing is no excuse at an airport that size with that kind of airspace. Somebody high up in the food chain with integrity and authority should be closing the runway if staffing is so low that it becomes unsafe. And I'm no expert, but having enough staff for separate air and ground control seems like a minimum safety requirement unless it's a tiny airport.
That seems unusual to me. It’s common at smaller airports, but for a big one like LaGuardia I’d think tower and ground would be two different controllers, even lateish at night like this was. I know there has been a staffing problem for controllers in the NY area for some time.
Speaking very generally, it's not unusual at all. Tower and ground are combined all the time - at smaller airports.
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.)
Reddit aviation groups are full of professional pilots, saying how terrified they of flying into La Guardia or JFK, recounting close calls, with one saying how he avoided those two for 10 years...
It's not unusual for airports to reduce staff at night, and the incident occurred at 23:36 local time. Even at a very large airport in a very busy traffic area, one controller can probably handle normal operations at this hour.
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.
But think of the money they saved by not having to pay another air traffic controller! A controller's yearly salary is the cost of about 10 seconds of the Iran war, based on the recently-reported figure of $11.3B for six days.
I don't think it's money. I think it's requirements and training pipeline restraints. The system is predicated on being able to throw bodies at the problem, but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up. Personally, I didn't realize ATC as a possible career path until I was 36-- imagine my surprise when I found that I had already aged out.
The training is also not run particularly well. There's a single facility in Oklahoma that every prospective air traffic controller has to go through. I had a friend in college who graduated in the early 2010s with a four year degree in air traffic control. He waited several years for the FAA to tell him he could start training, a spot never opened up, and he moved on with his life and did something different. It's broken on a pretty fundamental level if we have a shortage of air traffic controllers but also people who want to do it can't get in.
> but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up
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.
Who would want to work that job once they find out what the day-to-day is like? I had an intern who looked at that out of the Air Force but he found out what you get paid and what the expectations are for the job and he figured he'd try his luck on something easier and better-paying like life-preserving medical devices. On a related note, why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?
I know this is a throwaway comment, but I can't let it pass.
> why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?
We're currently doing school visits for our kid, in a low-performing school district, and the teachers and administrators we've met have been impressive. I've worked in education, and visited a lot of schools in another professional capacity, so I know the questions to ask, and things to look for. I have no illusions about there being absolutely terrible teachers out there (and I'll tell you some horror stories, if you'd like), and doubtless any (hypothetical) bad teachers at those schools are being kept away from prospective parents, but your statement is hyperbolic in the extreme. The problems in the US school system are legion, but "every single teacher is crap" is not remotely true.
I get you. I'd say I had three good teachers, one absolutely awful one (that I would likewise condemn to hell), and the rest... meh. I hated their classes at the time, but with an adult perspective I can say that they didn't do me any harm, some people well, and (in at least one case) more (albeit non-academic) good for me than I could have recognized as a kid.
Should we do better? You bet your ass. I have all kinds of ideas....
Nevertheless, both of our experiences put the lie to the GP's hyperbole. Bad as the rest might have been, you had at least two teachers who were exactly whom you'd want to be there.
Maybe it seems like I'm being pedantic, picking on GP's wording, but I'm really not. I'm trying to point that even those of us who had a bad time in education (and, to be clear: I did, too) experienced a few bright spots. It's important, if we're going to engage ourselves with any kind of reform, a) not to shit on the entire teaching profession, b) to consider what made those good teachers good, and c) think about how to support the quality people already in the system, and to attract more like them to it.
I think the comparison to public education is apt: often (at least initially) great people trapped in a terrible system. I suppose you can pay people to ignore a certain amount of misery on top of the job, but I do not believe you can (or should) completely obviate all brokenness in a system at the end of two weeks in a paycheck.
It’s not a money thing. It’s a shortage of people who are mentally able to do the job mixed with terrible hours and early forced retirements. ATC school has a failure rate of over 50 percent.
It's partially a money thing. ATC is under-compensated. They'd get more - and more talented - people interested if the money made up for the stress, hours, and early forced retirement.
Or increased their hiring funnel. Air traffic controller applicants must be under 31 years old for initial hire, which rules out a lot of potential hires.
New York State is large. It has lots of airports [0] - although not all of those are towered, you're still dividing that 260 down by quite a lot. And I don't believe it's standard practice to fly some dude in Buffalo down to NYC to cover a shift. There's a huge staffing problem in ATC right now.
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?
>you're still dividing that 260 down by quite a lot
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.
260/32 is around 8. "A lot" is subjective but I think that fits the bill?
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?
>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.
As it's not SOP to have one guy working both tower and ground at an airport the size of LGA, I'm going to assert that the most likely scenario is that, yes, there was no way to even have a relief available.
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.
Do you know how many towered facilities there are in New York state?
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?
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.
You know the airports are open for multiple shifts per day, seven days a week, people take vacations, people get sick, and all that nasty variability that comes into place for staffing.
We’ve been understaffed on ATCs for years. Whatever the number that currently exists is not enough regardless of whatever back of the napkin math you can come up with. We just need more ATCs.
But that costs money and why would you spend money on redundancies in your system when you could cut costs and call it efficient.
The problem is that you're comparing numbers from before Trump's presidency, but the understaffing of FAA ATCs goes all the way back to when the Reagan administration fired all ATCs to break up the union and forbade the FAA from rehiring any former union members.
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.
This sounds like a right-wing conspiracy theory. Are you saying that, in order to hire more black people, the FAA deliberately created a test only black people could pass? Do you have any evidence of this assertion?
Note: SideburnsOfDoom looks into the claim below and says, “In summary, spending 5 minutes digging into it gives every impression of it being culture war nonsense.”
The only domain I recognize is Newsweek, and given the nature of astroturfing, I’m not going to trust domains I don’t recognize.
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.
Not a pilot or a controller, just a nerd. My take from reading about it was that a large number of high performing potential ATC controllers who had followed the traditional pipeline were ditched. Ofc it's possible they hired exactly as many ppl as they would have otherwise, but in any job with a long lead time for training, a sudden change in the pipeline is going to cause ripples further on for years to come. Maybe the ppl they did hire had a higher attrition rate so that while they had the same # of ppl in the short term, in the long term, they faced shortages. Maybe some % of those they did hire required some % of extra supervision or training. Ofc not insurmountable or fatal, it just means extra pressure that will exert itself in some fashion for years to come after the initial disruption. I have no idea of last night's incident could be considered downstream of the testing change, I was just responding to the allegation that it was a conspiracy theory, however I also don't think it's implausible that it contributed to it in some indirect way.
Maybe the ppl they hired had a lower attrition rate! Maybe the people hired required less supervision and training than the CTI graduates would have! Maybe this had rippling effects on increasing their hiring pipeline as people of color were more likely to see opportunities here.
Your comment presuming it was at best neutral, and any likely change was for the worse is exactly what racism looks like.
That seems like too much for a single person to do, but I can also see how having too many controllers all trying to coordinate amongst themselves could be bad. How do airports determine the optimal number of controllers to have at a given time?
There is no "the" issue in airline accidents. There are always multiple factors, and all of them had to happen in order for the accident to occur.
Understaffing is absolutely a factor. Had tower and ground not been combined, the erroneous clearance probably wouldn't have been issued.
The ARFF truck not complying with the stop instruction is absolutely a factor. Had they heard and complied, the accident wouldn't have happened.
And there are likely additional factors that will come out in the investigation.
I recommend reading some final aviation accident reports from the NTSB to learn more about how these investigations proceed and what kinds of conclusions and recommendations they include.
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.
