m_fayerLaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/24/laguardia-airplane-pilots-safety-concerns-crash
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.
This. Go look at the atc subreddit, controllers have been begging for help for ages. This isn't one guy's fault.
>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)
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.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311
originally passed as
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=2023&num=0&req=g...
So arguably if Reagan had not fired them he would be failing to uphold the laws of the United States.
There have been six presidents who could have addressed this since Reagan. Every one of them shoulders some of the responsibility.
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.
One thing people forget is that the key complaints PATCO's members had were:
1. outdated equipment
2. staffing levels
3. workload and fatigue
Reagan went to war with the union instead of addressing these things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...
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.
Pretty much everything broken in the USA stems directly from Reagen.
Why is One Man Always Blamed For Everything Wrong With America?
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.
31. If you had started 2 years ago you should have been fine.
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.
The perfect wake up call before this perfect wake up call was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...
Imagine how good the next wake up call will be!
See also Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster: https://theonion.com/preemptive-memorial-honors-future-victi...
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
Setting people up for failure and then using them as scapegoats, this simply infuriates me.
Expecting a single person to consistently keep their mental picture clear and perfect for their entire career is asinine and irresponsible.
We need systems and tools to eliminate such errors and support people, not use them as a person to blame when things inevitably go wrong.
From the article:
> But he [Sean Duffy] denied rumors that the tower had only one controller on duty.
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.
Hopefully some commercial professional pilots will comment on this thread, but if you go to sites where they normally hang out like:
https://www.airlinepilotforums.com
You will see many are terrified ( in commercial pilot terms...) of flying into La Guardia or JFK...
> 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?
The controller was talking to Frontier plane when he first said stop, then said stopstopTruck1stopstopstop and it would be easy for there to be a gap in processing for the driver of truck 1 because the verbiage all flowed in the same stanza that was started when addressing the Frontier flight.
I am afraid the fire truck might have some level of responsibility, since it seems FAA ground vehicle guidance says:
AC No: 150/5210-20A - "Subject: Ground Vehicle Operations to include Taxiing or Towing an Aircraft on Airports"
https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...
“you must ensure that you look both ways down the runway to visually acquire aircraft landing or departing even if you have a clearance to cross.”
These trucks seem to have pretty good visibility from inside. Not sure if La Guardia model was the same: https://youtu.be/rfILwYo3sXc
Not arguing with the regulations, just pointing out that based on airport diagram[1], since the truck was crossing rwy on taxiway D, the CRJ was on the right approaching from behind. I have never been inside an airport firetruck, but I guess from the driver's seat the jet would be quite hard to see in this case.
That is a good point but it seems instructions for ground vehicles seem to really stress this. For example this one:
https://skybrary.aero/sites/default/files/bookshelf/1003.pdf
Says at pag 9:
"While driving on an aerodrome : Clear left, ahead, above and right
Scan the full length of the runway and the approaches for possible landing aircraft before entering or crossing any runway, even if you have received a clearance."
>but I guess from the driver's seat the jet would be quite hard to see in this case.
They have mostly glass cabs for exactly that reason. Only thing that would block your view is a passenger in the right seat.
"Liability" isn't really how we try to see things in aviation. While it's true that it's ultimately considered the responsibility of the truck/plane to visually confirm that crossing the runway is safe, refuse unsafe commands from ATC, and comply to the best of their ability when ATC says "stop" at the last second, we can't stop our analysis there if we want to prevent this from happening in the future, because unless things change someone will make this mistake again in the future. Telling people not to make mistakes isn't going to help at all; it's obvious, and no one wants to cause an accident. The error is just the last step in the process that led to the collision.
I don't think the ATC is at fault here. If they were put in a difficult situation and responsible for too much at once, I'd view that as a leadership bug, not their personal fault (or anything they should be held liable for). The weak links imo here are the firetruck driver and whoever that ATC reports to directly (i.e., there shouldn't have been an opportunity for this to happen—that's an executive failure, whether they want to take ownership or not).
> this seems to be exacerbated by government cuts
What government cuts? 2025 FAA air traffic budget was up around 7% from 2025
https://enotrans.org/article/senate-bill-oks-27-billion-faa-...
From the article:
> The crash has raised fears that operations at US airports are under extreme stress. Airports have been dealing with a shortage of air traffic controllers, exacerbated by brutal federal government personnel cuts by Donald Trump’s administration at the start of his second presidency.
Not my opinion, just reading from there.
Truck was on a different frequency from the aircraft so they couldn’t even hear each others’ clearances.
Also first time ATC told the truck to stop it wasn’t too clear who the message was addressed to. It’s a bit hard to hear “Truck1” there, not clear who he wants to stop. The second time, one can argue by the time “stop” command was heard it might have been better to gun the engine. As the truck sort of slowed down in the middle of the runway.
> 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...
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Los_Angeles_runway_collis... is more applicable.
Admiral Cloudberg has a great writeup about this. I instantly thought of LA when I saw the headlines about the LaGuardia collision.
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c...
In both cases, the controller's fate was grim. Peter Nielsen (Überlingen) was murdered by a relative of a crash victim. Robin Lee Wascher (LA), whose own parents had died in an earlier air crash, was crucified in the media and never worked as a controller again.
Both precedents are applicable, because the Laguardia controller is also going to be savaged.
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.
Understand what happened and prevent it from happening again, so long as this can be done without expanding staffing, reducing OT, structural change, etc
No. Safety investigation agencies deliberately aren't regulators. The NTSB may decide that their recommendation is that every air passenger should be carrying a melon, and that results in a press release, a letter to the FAA saying that's what they recommend, that's all.
Deciding to change policies to effect the recommendation isn't their role. That's why you will so often see a safety investigatory body repeatedly recommend the same thing. The UK's RAIB (which is for Rail investigations) for example will often call out why a fatal accident they've investigated wouldn't have happened if the regulator had implemented some prior recommendation, either one they're slow walking or have rejected.
The investigators don't need to care about other factors. Are melons too expensive? Not their problem. Only unfriendly countries grow melons? Not their problem. They only need to care about recommending things that would prevent future harm which is their purpose.
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.
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.
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.
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?
There is actually a set of lights which should have displayed red towards the trucks.
Were they not operating correctly, or did the driver ignore them is one of the questions the investigation will answer.
The system is called Runway Status Lights. And in case there is a disagreement between the ATC clearance and the lights the drivers are supposed to not enter the runway.
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
It is not working based on approval but based on sensors observing the airplane on final. Even if the plane is landing without clearance, even if the ATC is held hostage by a terorist or having a stroke the lights should turn red when an airplane is approaching the runway from the sky.
This pdf talks more about how it is implemented: https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/WEB_Final_RWSL.p...
“RWSL is driven by fused multi-sensor surveillance system information. Using
Airport Surface Detection Equipment-Model X (ASDE-X), external surveillance
information is taken from three sources that provide position and other
information for aircraft and vehicles on or near the airport surface. RWSL safety
logic processes the surveillance information and commands the field lighting
system to turn the runway status lights on and off in accordance with the motion of
the detected traffic.”
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
https://viewfromthewing.com/__trashed-13/
So maybe we'll be looking at training and fatigue for the firefighters too
LaGuardia Crash Video Shows Runway Lights Told Fire Truck Not To Enter — Why Were They Ignored?
Video of the fatal LaGuardia runway collision appears to show the autonomous runway status lights illuminated red as the fire truck entered the runway — a warning system designed to tell vehicles and aircraft not to proceed even if they have a clearance. That does not settle blame, and the investigation will still have to sort out what air traffic control, the truck crew, and airport procedures each contributed, but it adds a critical detail to a crash that already killed the two pilots of the arriving Air Canada Express jet.