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.
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?
"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).