LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/24/laguardia-airplane-pilots-safety-concerns-crash

LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

Nasa reports show repeated warnings of close calls before crash that killed two pilots and injured 41 others

The Guardian
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?

> 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-...

Senate Bill OK's $27 Billion FAA Budget in FY25 - The Eno Center for Transportation

July 26, 2024 - The Senate's FY25 DOT funding bill would allow $27 billion in funding for the Federal Aviation Administration in 2025.

The Eno Center for Transportation

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.

Notably 2025 was also the year that Elon started firing people and shutting down things that were in the budget, as well as several shutdowns.