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 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 outdated equipment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.
