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 outdated equipment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