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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

#251

Post by pc86 »

VK-pro wrote: post #84
pc86 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planes landing at a rate of one every 30-40 minutes isn't exactly "overworked."

I don’t have time to check flight logs but I personally landed at LGA coming from MDW on Sunday. And I also know people who got diverted within the hour coming back to LGA that night. 30-40 minutes doesn’t seem accurate. That aside, if you’ve ever done operational staffing, you’d know that you should probably have at least one redundancy. When there is any chance of emergency or two events happening simultaneously, y…

Almost every night there are 6-7 hours with zero or near-zero scheduled departures and very few scheduled arrivals.

The controller shortage has nothing to do with pay, controllers make a lot of money.

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

#252

Post by _moof »

rekrsiv wrote: post #89
pc86 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the controller in question was working both ground and air control simultaneously due to staffing shortages How many planes land at LGA in the middle the night? One controller overnight is completely reasonable.

Can a single human being reliably and robustly maintain a safety-critical system alone under any circumstances, ever? Ever?

I design and conduct space missions, and I'm an experienced professional pilot. The answer to your question is "never."

Any system that requires perfect performance from any one human will fail.

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

#253

Post by hatthew »

krisoft wrote: post #197
vkou wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every other truck in the column immediately stopped when the call was made. Truck 1 was the only one that didn't.

I very much doubt that you know the exact timing of the event. My guess is that you might have seen a video where some industrious editor put the ATC recordings over the leaked surveilance footage, but there is no way that is correctly synced.

With publicly available information we can sync it to within ~2 seconds. All trucks other than the first one were definitely in the process of stopping in between the first and second time ATC told them to stop (5 seconds apart).

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

#254

Post by rglover »

bko wrote: post #209
rglover wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You said budget cuts, not me.

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

#255

Post by blobbers »

I hear a lot of folks ascribing safety to physical human shortages in staffing.

Looking at airport security, it's impossible not to ascribe waste, fraud and abuse if indeed there is a lack of ATC hires causing this. We can go without a greeter at the beginning of the security line, or a pre-screener of boarding passes halfway through the security line and have an extra ATC on duty. If you can't find the extra $ for that you're either blind or we need to charge each passenger $1 more.

The truth is, this sort of situational control shouldn't really be given to a human.

This is exactly the kind of thing a computer should be handling, in the same way we don't have a traffic guard at every intersection. Yes I understand airports are complex. So you have a computer and a human, and they work together.

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

#256

Post by hugh-avherald »

_moof wrote: post #247
rekrsiv wrote: post #109

I am alarmed at the high number of supposed engineers on this thread that are seemingly unaware of how safety-critical systems work. Literally every other piece of this system has redundancy built into it. Robustness is never optional in a scenario involving human safety. When did this lunacy become an arguable position?

This is my field and the amount of extremely confident nonsense I've read on here in the last 24 hours is going to put me in the cardiac ICU.

You're still using outdated bio-hearts? Wouldn't it be better to just use a cronjob on a server-controlled heart?

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

#257

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

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.

The NTSB also isn’t the organisation that makes any changes nor, as you suggest, assigns any penalties.

The NTSB only makes recommendations.

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

#258

Post by GarnetFloride »

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…

When I was young I took a tour of an air traffic control center near New York. By the end I knew it was not for me. Everyone looked stressed. Things have gotten so much worse.

This guy was doing at least 3 people's jobs even before the first emergency occurred.

Then it was an inevitable cascade failure situation. It was never his fault.

Management failed here. If its stupid but it works, its not stupid, is the old saying, but the reality I've seen is its still stupid but you got lucky. -Maxim 43

The luck finally ran out.

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

#259

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

wk_end wrote: post #147
rglover wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 control…

"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 unles…

The NTSB’s role is to not to assign blame.

We aren’t in the aviation industry, and neither are we the NTSB.

Prosecutions and convictions do occur as a result of aviation incidents, pilots loose their jobs, pilots loose their licenses, ATC staff can be prohibited from ever working in the industry again.

We free to talk about all of those aspects here.

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

#260

Post by soperj »

alistairSH wrote: post #219
estearum wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyth…

extremely aberrational Is it still an aberration the second time 'round?

He lost the vote the first time. He lost to a corpse the second time he ran, it was like Weekend at Bernie's.
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