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
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.
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.