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LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

theguardian.com

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Re: LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

#201

Post by wat10000 »

jimbokun wrote: post #195
rectang wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The current US President is the last person we should listen to when it comes to deciding anything important.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who are legally obligated to listen to him for many important decisions.

Re: LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

#202

Post by wat10000 »

longislandguido wrote: post #176
0xy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LaGuardia did have a fully staffed ATC, and there's zero evidence this controller was overworked. You seem to be prematurely ascribing cause when nothing has been investigated yet.

The parent post was unjustly flagged for no other reason than facts make overly emotional people here squirm with anger. Pathetic and lame. This is worthy of losing flagging privileges IMO. The Secretary of Transportation said on record at the first press conference that reports this guy was working alone in the tower are INACCURATE. The actual number is the responsibility of the NTSB to disclose. 95% of this discuss…

If a member of this administration said he wasn’t working alone, that’s solid evidence he was.

The evidence that he was overworked seems pretty damned obvious. He forgot about an entire airplane and put a fire truck in its path. The evidence of overwork is strewn all around LGA.

Re: LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

#203

Post by hectormalot »

wk_end wrote: post #143
ndiddy wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Indeed. Similar accident (USAir 1493/Skywest 5569) shows that thinking exactly.[1] Was easy to pin on the controller, they went far beyond that in their analysis. Almost always impressed with the professionalism of those organizations. I sometimes wonder how software would look if we had such investigations for major incidents.

1: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c...

Re: LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

#204

Post by RankingMember »

mmooss wrote: post #193
RankingMember wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one controller was handling both ground and air is still a bit of a tell that there was some short-handedness afoot, though, by my eye. > The best thing is to patiently find reliable info and stick to it. No disagreement here

> That one controller was handling both ground and air ... Why do you (or why does anyone) think that? My point in the GP was, I have yet to see evidence that there was only one controller, and I have seen evidence that there were two.

Because in the ATC recording you hear him directing both

Re: LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

#205

Post by spprashant »

9front wrote: post #191

"... we have an odor on the plane as well here at this time. We are going to be going back to the gate, request fire as well." - United pilot "2384, it is oder like a smoke odor ...like from fire?" - Control "No, it was a weird odor. I don't know exactly how to describe it. But yeah... we can't get a hold of anyone at the ops for a gate assignment." - United pilot "Ground, United 2384 is declaring an emergency. The f…

Feel bad for the ATC officer. I hope they can find it in them to forgive themselves.

Re: LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

#206

Post by Eufrat »

ndiddy wrote: post #5

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…

I suspect someone is literally asking the idiotic question if they can just replace our air traffic controllers with an AI.

Re: LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

#207

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

voxic11 wrote: post #19
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

They were striking for less outdated tools, improving staffing levels, and other safety improvements. The solution was to give them the things they wanted.

Re: LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

#208

Post by wsbetter »

newsclues wrote: post #137
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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)

Or instead of pointing fingers we can uses our brains to solve the problems and increase safety. You could spend a ton of time and money automating the process, and probably should especially in the future with the proliferation of drones. But in the meantime there are simple solutions. Tunnels. No ground vehicles should be crossing runways when then could go under.

It might sound simple, but won't tunnels lower the strength of the runways (I presume that's where you would put them)? Strengthening that would create an expensive solution to a basic communication problem. That's like saying instead of 4 way stops, we elevate the two intersecting roads to avoid collision, just because someone may have ran the stop sign.

Also, ground vehicles typically need to be on the ground for a reason. Why seperate them?

Re: LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

#209

Post by bko »

rglover wrote: post #184
bko wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

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.

So where there budget cuts or not? That was the claim. I have yet to find anything that suggests there were budget cuts, just vague mentions of "brutal federal government personnel cuts".

I'm just looking for: budget was X in Y

Re: LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash

#210

Post by estearum »

rectang wrote: post #198
jimbokun wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current US President is the last person we should listen to when it comes to deciding anything important.

By using the role name rather than proper name, I'd hoped to spare HN from a tangent like this. My point doesn't rest on the nature of single individual, but instead applies to a human tendency. Politicians and press both play to the base impulses of a mass audience, unlike the NTSB. This is not the first time that a politician has scapegoated individuals when systemic failure occurs.

I actually can't remember or imagine another POTUS even getting to a level of specificity required to scapegoat an individual for something like this. The usual (and correct) answer is to say: "We don't know yet what happened, but there will be a full investigation and we will make the changes necessary to prevent it from happening again."

Pretty easy!

It doesn't serve us well to act like this administration is anything other than extremely aberrational.

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