In 2026, with how much money their is in aviation, it seems wild to not have digitized this ages ago. The runway should be essentially 'locked' when in use, if they don't want screens in every ground vehicle that may cross a runway, at least display it at runway entrances.
That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point. And there's pretty much no way to make ATC's job not stressful, its inherently stressful. Taking out how much of their job is held in the current operators mind versus being 'committed' seems like low hanging fruit 30 years ago.
The whole system's just begging for human error to occur. There's 1700+ runway incursions a year in the US alone, each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed. Like when an accident occurs.
While modernizing ATC in the US may be overdue, the real issue here is that ATC in the US has been understaffed, underpaid, and overworked for a while now.
My father works ATC and his schedule has him working overtime, 6 shifts a week, including overnight shifts, meaning that there is literally not a day of the week where he doesn't spend at least some time in the tower.
If that's the reality for even half of the controllers, it's no surprise that we've been seeing more and more traffic accidents lately.
It’s also hard to hire for. Candidates for job openings must be between the ages of 21-31 years old. Yes they are legally forbidden from hiring anyone older.
> Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the boiling?
I'm Australian. In Australia, if you are forced to work overtime the rate of pay goes up, by 50% or if it's extreme, double. As a consequence "underpaid" isn't a common complaint of people working lots of overtime.
This has some negative consequences of course. If labour is plentiful you can have lots of people on hand and pay them on an hours-worked basis. The same deal applies - if you go beyond 40 hours a week their rate of pay goes up, but that shouldn't happen if labour is plentiful and management is on the ball.
But if, as in this case labour isn't plentiful, then they are going to have to fix it some other way - like paying to train more staff. What the employers can't do is offload the problem entirely onto their employees, so there are forces compelling them to get their act together.
The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US.
Workers in these jobs in the US have less protections than the private sector as they are deemed imperative to operating the country. As such it is illegal for them to strike for better wages, but they do receive 1.5x wages during their mandatory overtime work, and have a base wage over twice that of the annual median income, before their significant overtime income. I think the burn out is a bigger cause.
No it isn’t. The metaphor is that if you throw a frog into already boiling water it would attempt to jump out. If you start with tepid water and increase the temperature slowly enough they don’t. Sadly this was proven through experiment in the 1800s.
It’s an argument that if you make changes slowly enough people won’t notice.
In the experiment you mention, before they put the frog in the cool water, they removed its brain. Then they boiled the water. The frog did not jump out of the water because it had no brain. The experiment proved the opposite of what you are asserting.
We as a society are both ATCs and plane passengers, and most often, the latter. And when an overworked ATC makes an error, we indeed may fail to survive.
In reality when these experiments were conducted the frog simply jumped out as soon as the temperature started to raise, frogs will not sit there in slowly boiling water and just die without trying to escape way before the water becomes dangerous.
Sadly most of us are hopeless lobster boiled by greater powers. Unlike the crabs through you still can save the other lobsters by refraining to eat them.
It's quite a tired take that the obesity epidemic is because Americans have too much affordable access to good food. America has affordable access to terrible food and while people can keep their bellies full on that actually eating healthily is a luxury.
People who can afford crappy fast food can afford chicken breast and rice with veggies store bought and made at home. Just easier to kick back with a Big Mac and fries after work. Personal responsibility is key
“Made at home” means time. I cook 3 meals a day in my house and it’s a significant dent in other things I could be doing. The more stress I take on from work, the less effortful food I make. I have taken years in my adult life to get good enough to “throw something together” that is healthy and is something I enjoy eating and would choose over a burger. I still eat a lot of burgers.
Personal responsibility sure but that often comes with utter ignorance of the systems that people find themselves in, especially poverty and mental health. The bottom 50% own nothing, have no security, and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.
It's simple... AI and automation will be gradually replacing everyone's job. The reason people are overworked is because they can't afford to lose their job.
No that is not the issue. Runway incursions have always been a problem and many deaths have occurred.
There have been many attempts to change phraseology, teach pilots and controllers to always readback runways, etc. but nothing that actually prevents the issue from occurring entirely via automation.
The incursion was by a fire engine which was hurrying to handle yet another incident. The weather was foggy, it was raining, and the incoming plane was already low, so it was pretty hard to tell it apart from many other lights shining from the fog in the distance. It's not easy to assess the speed of motion when a fuzzy ball of light is advancing right towards you.
The pilot was given the clearance to land before the fire engine was dispatched. Apparently there was not even enough time for the crew to max out the thrust and try to lift off the strip even if they managed to notice the lights of the incoming fire engine.
Planes use a system called TCAS to prevent collisions in the sky, this system is independent of ATC and works even if ATC is not paying attention or if pilots have the wrong frequency tuned. It detects impending collisions and gives both pilots clear and automated alerts plus an action IE climb + turn to execute immediately to prevent a collision.
A similar system can and should be used for runways.
As a thought experiment, imagine how many car accidents there would be if instead of traffic lights, each person had a AM radio in their car and police officers called out over the radio which cars should proceed across the intersection. That is the unfortunate state of modern? aviation.
I have ADS-B in my airplane and can see everything on the ground on a pretty map as if it were literally a video game. I can see landing aircraft in realtime while holding short or crossing a runway. The emergency responder should have had it in their fire truck.
The technology already exists. The problem has already been solved with an iPad and a $200 receiver. Almost certainly some BS regulation or rule was at least partially responsible here.
Why are we discussing the issue being ATC workers when the recordings make it clear that they had identified the issue and ordered the vehicle to stop? Sound like the issue is whoever was driving the truck not doing what was asked of them for whatever reason. Unless of course it was equipment failure.
Controller probably should've told them to expedite the crossing or warned that traffic was about to land, but they were managing a lot at once; tower+ground by themselves and an emergency already.
It’s also the only industry that is legally allowed to practice ageism. You have to start before or up to 31 years of age. You’re out at age 56. This figures into how the benefits are structured.
The politicization of government budgeting has made inefficiency rife. Sometimes new allocations are done purely for brownie points and there's genuine wastage - other times cuts are made that save a penny but lose a pound in the guise of efficiency. Doge was an excellent example in just how many severance payouts for employees who were occasionally rehired due to staffing shortages it triggered.
> The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?
ATC has been a shit career prospect for a while now so no one wants to enter training.
For one it requires uprooting your entire life to live near a training center, then they send you on an apprenticeship to a random airport in the country for a few years. And since there are only so many slots in the desirable metros, most people get sent to live somewhere “undesirable” to say the least.
For two, while trainees get paid they get totally fucked during government shutdowns. Many who make it to the funnel also quit at that point. Without fundamental structural changes to how they’re trained and paid at the political level, the number of trainees will remain small.
Yes, when they work overtime they get paid more for that overtime than regular time.
The money doesn't somehow make it sustainable for the people burning out their lives. Working 7 days a week, including overnight shifts, for 20 years to collect a pension seems like WELL earned compensation.
That's seems unrelated to "we have so few" and "we enmiserate the one's we do have".
I think rahimnathwani's point was not that they get extra pay so it's fine, but that it seems economically irrational to overwork fewer staff if it's actually more expensive.
Here in Norway it's similar with doctors, they get paid a lot because they work crazy hours. But the doctors' association is fighting to keep it that way, as the old timers who didn't burn out along the way enjoys the high pay more than their spare time.
It's hard to argue you're underpaid if, as a result of short staffing, you're getting paid more (both in absolute terms and per unit of effort) than you signed up for.
Doesn’t this seem like the common practice in high-pension systems? You don’t use the overtime in pension calculations so it’s way cheaper to hire P people and run them on a 2x duty cycle than it is to hire 2P people and run them on a 1x duty cycle because the post retirement cost is Q in the first and 2Q in the latter.
You can’t account for overtime in pensions because the employees will conspire to force overtime for retiring employees to bounce the pension up. Just a natural risk with an entity that can’t go bankrupt hiring people.
Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.
this whole thing about funding and disaster is a big red herring. it tells me why we're talking about it, but it has nothing to do with how to solve the real, meaningful socioeconomic problem and why it keeps coming up in so many jobs. this is SO simple to understand but people resist it stubbornly. they WANT outrage. economic stuff isn't outrageous.
> tendency to strip funding until disaster happens
well there's a tendency to pass unfunded mandates too. They are two sides of the same coin. Here's another way I've heard it described, to show you that this is a "bipartisan" issue:
> the Daily Show problem. I love the Daily Show, and I think Jon Stewart is hysterical. But literally the answer to every single problem is “Congress should pass a new law.”
i don't think Marc Andreessen knows everything about everything the way that he thinks that he does. but he's not wrong. you are in the really lame "Congress should pass a new law" department - i guess to increase funding? - but you know, then it becomes, i don't see why it would be "enough" funding, we don't know, they could strike anyway...
personally, i believe the problem with guilded professions like "ATC guy" come about from complex but nonetheless finite incentives. so in a narrow sense, as long as some ATC controllers want to "work more, earn more," this problem will persist, it doesn't even have to be all ATC controllers, or even many, but the proportion of "work more, earn more" to "work less, earn less" personalities predicts the scale of the issues facing buyers of the guilded profession's services. other economists have talked about this and i'm sure someone will write great Causality Revolution paper about it for ATC.
broadly I think the problem has much more to do with the lack of economic opportunity in America, that there's minimum wage and everything else, and people are very risk averse like their peers in Europe or Asia but have less of a safety net so they are much more desperate. everyone is looking to guilds to solve their problem instead of demanding that their leaders support and deliver real growth, which makes me sound like Peter Thiel, and that should tell you everything you need to know about why this problem is so hard to solve. it's all politics, not a misunderstanding of the math about maintenance or disasters or whatever the fuck.
We recently had a lot more probationary ATCs cut because of specific action by Elon Musk's DOGE, which has since then resulted in two major air disasters due to poor ATC handling, which was virtually unheard of before.
This isn't some vague problem, it's a random asshole screaming "delete! Delete! Delete!" enlisting some random college dropouts to execute it for him, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives directly attributable to those short sighted changes.
This isn't a vague problem, it's a specific asshole who is killing people so he can appear on stage with a chainsaw.
What's impressive is that if you look at the issues PATCO struck over, it was basically identical to the problems ATC faces today. The problem being that everything has only gotten a lot worse for ATC controllers.
The union pretty loudly and early on pointed out major problems with that job and the response of ignoring them for 4 decades is what's driven us to the current situation.
Multiple economic write ups have concluded that Reagan’s “stick it to the upstart guy” cost us tax payers way more than it would if they’d just acceded and maybe even thrown in a gracious bonus to say thanks.
Larger sociology say the intangible cost to labor balance laws actually were much more.
Reagan’s trickle down (great euphemism for “piss on”) movement was the beginning of the demise of the GOP IMO. Disclaimed: I voted both times for him and many GOP followers.
A union that isn't allowed to legally strike when needed isn't a useful union though. The state that ATC has been in for the decades after that suggests to me that they were correct to strike.
There’s a pretty big difference between “economic leverage” when it means your stores might be shut down for a couple of weeks vs. all of the people moving, shipping, etc. in an entire country.
A strike being inconvenient? Workers leveraging how crucial they are? The stoppage of work having massive impacts across the country? Huh, maybe the powers that be should listen to the workers when they ask nicely for better conditions instead.
Reagan fired a bunch, and then (naturally) hired a bunch to replace them. ATC work, generally speaking, for twenty years (that's when their pension vests), so twenty years after the strike there was a "cliff", with a larger than usual number of ATC retirements. As I understand it, that was anticipated at the turn of the millennium, and hiring + training ramped up to compensate, without much disruption. The next "cliff", twenty years after that (ie, that millennium tranche retiring), coincided with 1) a less than forward-looking administration, and 2) COVID. We still haven't dug our way out from under the second wave of retirements.
You're absolutely right that solutions should have been taken, but it's also true that we're picking up the pieces of a decision taken forty years ago.
When paying for a (rare) failure is cheaper than paying for the (constant) absence of failure, it's just natural. You know, the optimal amount of fraud in a payment system is not zero. The optimal amount of fatal aircraft incidents is not an exact substitute, bit the pressure is of the same kind, I'm afraid :(
This was a special/unexpected situation - one of the other passenger jets declared an emergency and needed to evacuate the passengers onto the ground (there were no free gates to return). The firetruck was on it's way to assist with the emergency.
That's like the argument about how we'll never (or should never) have self driving cars.
Clearly human-run ATC results in situations like this, so the idea that automated ATC could result in a runway collision and should therefore never be implemented is bad.
It's not an argument for total automation but an argument for machine augmentation. It would be fascinating just as an experiment to feed the audio of the ATC + flight tracks [1] into a bot and see if it could spot that a collision situation had been created.
You obviously wouldn't authorize the bot to do everything, but you could allow it to autonomously call for stops or go-arounds in a situation like this where a matter of a few seconds almost certainly would have made the difference.
Imagine the human controller gives the truck clearance to cross and the bot immediately sees the problem and interrupts with "No, Truck 1 stop, no clearance. JZA 646 pull up and go around." If either message gets through then the collision is avoided, and in case of a false positive, it's a 30 second delay for the truck and a few minutes to circle the plane around and give it a new slot.
I'm not well-enough versed in HMI design or similar concepts, but I think this idea for augmentation could collide with alarm fatigue and the disengaged overseer problem in self-driving cars.
If we aren't confident enough in the automation to allow it to make the call for something simple like a runway incursion/conflict (via total automation), augmentation might be worse than the current approach that calls for 100% awareness by the ATC. Self-driving research shows that at level 2 and level 3, people tune out and need time to get back "in the zone" during a failure of automation.
> That's like the argument about how we'll never (or should never) have self driving cars.
The reason we won't ever have self-driving cars is that no matter how clever you make them, they're only any good when nothing is going wrong. They cannot anticipate, they can only react, too slowly, and often badly.
Imagine it were 90% automated. Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.
You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there forever, and not enough humans on the ground to manually land them.
Now image the outage is also happening at all airports nearby, preventing planes from diverting.
How do you get the planes out of the sky? Not enough humans to do it manually.
Now imagine the system comes back online. Does it know how to handle a crisis scenario where you have dozens of planes overhead, each about to run out of fuel? Hopefully someone thought of that edge case.
Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage? Now do that, but with airplanes that will fall thousands of feet and kill hundreds instead of park in the middle of the street.
I'm not saying we shouldn't automate things. We should. But, it's not easy. If it was, we would have done it already.
Speaking of runway crossings specifically, you could have an automated backup, and require authorization from both ATC and the automated system to enter a runway.
> Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.
Planes divert to another airport, passengers grumble, end of story. Airport closures can and do happen all the time for all kinds of reasons, including weather or equipment malfunctions.
There's exceptions all the time. They turn back because a warning light came on. They saw a deer on the runway, a passenger got up to the bathroom. There's no way that could be automatic, plus they often need atc to look at their jet to see if it's damaged.
My suggestion is to restrict the use of smaller jets like crj and turboprops. I know airports like LaGuardia can't handle the big jets either, but they could reduce the slots and require a jet that holds, say, 150 people or more. This would result in fewer flights per day to some airports, but reduce overall congestion while still serving the same number of passengers.
Overwork is an issue in general, but I don't know that it was the actual issue here.
> In audio from the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia, a staff member can be heard saying: "'Truck One, stop, stop, stop!" in the seconds before the crash.
It sounds to me like either the Cop or the Firefighter (whichever was driving) wasn't listening to ATC and this whole incident was probably completely avoidable.
EDIT: a video of the crash seems to have warning lights that the emergency vehicle ignored.
> Overwork is an issue in general, but I don't know that it was the actual issue here.
One controller working tower duties, ground movement duties, coordinating with other ATC functions off the radio, an active emergency request, and giving clearance amendments all within 2 minutes. It's insane understaffing. On top of it, there was nobody there to take over after the crash. He worked the whole cleanup for the next 30 minutes.
This is an Olympian level elite Air Traffic Controller who was setup to fail.
I've visited towers, center facilities, and have flying (and some instructing) in the San Francisco airspace for 10 years. That kind of failure is systemic way above an individual.
The audio I heard seems to show the firetruck asking if the runway is clear to cross, the controller responding in the affirmative, the firetruck confirming the affirmative, and then 7 seconds later, the controller saying STOP STOP STOP.
I think the gaps between transmissions have been trimmed, too; this isn't matching other versions of the ATC audio, such as [VASAviation's][1].
> The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.
IANA-ATC, but presumably in an emergency, you're permitted to obtain clearance from ATC to enter an active runaway, to get to the emergency. (Which they did, and got, but which ATC later effectively revokes with the command to stop, prior to the accident. Whether ATC should have granted the clearance, well, I'll wait for the NTSB report there.)
Air traffic (and ground traffic) control are not simple problems. La Guardia has 350k aircraft operations (takeoffs and landings) every year. 1000/day. Peak traffic is almost certainly more than 1 plane every minute. Runways are always in use and the idea that some simple software will solve all the safety problems is not grounded in reality.
This isn’t hypothetical, this system just exists in other countries. Digital systems can confirm flight instruction from ATC with zero radio communication.
The issue is that the final approach and landing (and taxiing?) environments are probably too dynamic for that: in this particular situation one of the vehicles was responding to an emergency (fire).
In addition to huge planes, there is baggage transportation, passenger buses (to mid-field terminals), fuel pumpers, emergency vehicles, snow plows, deicers, and general maintenance vehicles (clear debris off runways).
I’m not saying we couldn’t move more into automation. What I’m saying is that doing so will not solve all of our air/ground control problems. We still have human pilots and humans driving vehicles on the ground. Switching from humans directing landings to machines might improve some things but will not solve for all (and probably not most) risks.
Literally the crash here was caused by a fire truck entering the runway.
The ATC told them to enter the runway because they were confused or distracted due t overwork.
No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
People are saying automation could handle a significant portion of the routine things allowing humans to handle the more complex/finicky issues.
Even if automation could handle 10% of the most common situations it would be a huge boon. In reality its probably closer to 50%.
There's unfortunately an alertness problem WRT automated systems.
If the reason you have the human there is to handle the unusual cases, you run the real risk that they just aren't paying attention at critical moments when they need to pay attention.
It's pretty similar to the problem with L3 autonomous driving.
Probably the sweet spot is automation which makes clear the current set of instructions on the airport which also red flags when a dangerous scenario is created. I believe that already exists, but it's software that was last written in 1995 or so.
Regardless, before any sort of new automation could be deployed, we need slack for the ATC to be able to adopt a new system. That's the biggest pressing problem. We could create the perfect software for ATC, but if the current air traffic controllers are all working overtime and doing a job designed for 3 people rather than one, they simply won't have the time to explore and understand that new system. It'll get in the way rather than solve a problem. More money is part of the solution here, but we also need a revamped ATC training program which can help to fill the current hole.
> The ATC told them to enter the runway because they were confused or distracted due t overwork.
Very possibly. It will be interesting what comes from the investigation.
> No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
I’m asking if it would have solved even the current situation. The truck presumably saw the red light, and was asking to cross. Would traffic control have said no if more had been automated and if so, what automation would fix this? Unless we are supposing the truck would be autonomously driven and refuse to proceed when planes are landing, in which case, maybe, though that’s not really ATC automation anymore.
an automated system that could check if a plane is about to land on a runway and show some kind of alert or red light is hardly a stretch of the imagination
Thank you for providing your aviation knowledge to this discussion. What a classic example of tech people thinking that because they're smart, every other industry must be dumb and they can just jump in and fix it.
I also do not like this persistent tone of “everyone else is stupid; software would easily fix it” that pops up so often. Not all problems are easy to fix with some code.
To be clear, though, I don’t even have significant aviation knowledge. But this isn’t hard to learn about. That’s part of what irks me so much about this tone. It’s not just “I’m so smart” it’s “I’m so confident that you’re dumb that I don’t need to know anything about the domain you’re working in to know better than you”. Someone could ask ChatGPT why airports don’t have stoplights to stop traffic from crossing the runway and it would reveal the existence of this system.
Agreed, but I see this in every industry. And though it's certainly arrogant on some level, I think of it in a more positive light: people are generally optimistic and want to solve problems.
My grandfather had a rule at his business for 55-ish years: we welcome your ideas and suggestions, but not for the first year. You spend that time learning our processes, decisions behind them, pain points, areas that need improvement, etc. You also spend that time doing the work and hearing from your colleagues. Then you can (hopefully) make informed suggestions. That's not possible in every situation, but I like the intent.
In an ideal world this would be like rail traffic, where the runway would be 'locked' (red signal) due to the landing plane, and the fire engine would have to explicitly request an override to cross the locked runway, and importantly, this process has to be _rare_. If it's something that's done 5000 times a day, it'll be normalized. Everyone involved should be aware of the dangers of traversing a 'locked' runway.
What is _really_ needed is a replacement of the archaic narrowband analog FM radio. Where you can't listen and talk at the same time. There are probably at least several dozen accidents where the inability to communicate with an aircraft or a road vehicle was a contributing factor.
I would settle for a good digital system with an ability to issue emergency/priority calls to specific receivers. Oh, and full-duplex communication.
I'm practicing for a sports pilot license, and I really have problems with understanding other pilots and the ATC.
I'm pretty sure the amount of data isn't the problem here. Maybe it's the number of corner cases? You would still want some human-in-the loop with quality UI for ATC.
There are plenty of stories of ATC helping to guide pilots back to the ground after an engine failure or after a student pilot had their instructor pass out on them or something like that.
Even if most of the work is routine, you definitely still want a human in the loop.
It's worth pointing out that plenty of pilots take off and land safely at uncontrolled airports. ATC is a throughput optimization; the finite amount of airspace can have more aircraft movements if the movements are centrally coordinated. It feels like we are nearing the breaking point of this optimization, however, and it's probably worth looking for something better (or saying no to scheduling more flights).
The FAA already does issue temporary ground stops for IFR flights when ATC capacity is saturated. This acts as a limit on airlines scheduling more flights, although the feedback loops are long and not always effective. The FAA NextGen system should improve this somewhat.
A third runway for Heathrow was formally proposed in 2007 and is projected for completion in 2040. This is an airport so overburdened people are buying and trading slots.
This isn't a Kubernetes cluster where you can add VMs in 30 seconds.
Did it? They didn’t get there so did we get bigger fire at their target?
I imagine the training will consist of something like changing the comms protocol to say “runway lights are on, control. Truck 1 confirming cross runway 4D?” prior to crossing. Double check so to speak.
>> Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.
A naive view that confuses the map with the territory.
While in a database state you write a row and reality updates atomically....for aircraft they exist in a physical world where your model lives with lag, noise, and lossy sensors, and that world keeps moving whether your software is watching or not. Failed database transactions roll back, a landing clearance issued against stale state does not. The hard problem in ATC is not coordination logic but physical objects with momentum, human agency, and failure modes that do not respect your consistency model.
But context is important. "Low-hanging fruit" doesn't mean the solution is "easy" in a vacuum, it just means this specific aspect is the easiest and/or most obvious place to start attacking a problem.
Or to stick with the language of the analogy, every fruit tree has some fruit that is lower than the others. That doesn't mean all "low-hanging fruit" is within arm's reach of the ground, some fruit just doesn't require as big of a ladder as other fruit.
This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case. I don't know enough about ATC to have any confidence in my opinion on the viability of replacing humans with software.
I disagree with you entirely. "Lowest-hanging fruit" isn't the same as "low-hanging fruit". The phrase "low-hanging fruit" does specifically mean that the solution is easy, in a vacuum - the fruits are "low", which is not relative to the other fruits or the height of the tree, but relative to the ground.
I think you're mistaken. That whooshing sound must have been my comment flying over your head.
That was my first comment in this thread, so there was no established goal to change. My sole goal was to clarify the meaning of an idiom that the comment I was replying to was misstating.
I even included a disclaimer that "This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case", so I don't know how you could have received it as such.
> The runway should be essentially 'locked' when in use, if they don't want screens in every ground vehicle that may cross a runway, at least display it at runway entrances.
It does, the Runway Status Lights System uses radar to identify when the runway is in use and shows a solid bright red bar at every entrance to the runway. I'm curious what the NTSB has to say about it for this incident. From the charts LGA does have RWSLs. I didn't check NOTAM to see if they were out of service though.
> From the charts LGA does have RWSLs. I didn't check NOTAM to see if they were out of service though.
Just to add…
The vehicle in question got clearance from ATC to cross the runway. ATC revoked it shortly afterwards (by radioing "Tower, Truck 1. Stop truck 1. Stop! Stop Truck 1, STOP!" (followed by the incident; the next transmission is go-arounds.)); presumably, ATC realized the impending danger. I am assuming that requesting permission from ATC to enter a runway in an emergency is a permitted action, so RWSL aren't going to prevent this type of incident.
I don't think we know why Truck 1 did not heed the stop warning (e.g., if it came too later, got lost, etc.), but I am thinking that if they understood the indication from the RWSL, they overrode it by getting clearance, because they needed to cross the runway due to the (first) emergency.
So, same. Will be curious to see what NTSB says. I suspect something about resource management: there seems to be too much happening, too quickly, for that one ATC controller. While perhaps the controller makes mistakes, the mistakes appear to my untrained ear as "reasonable", and I'd like the system to be such that reasonable mistakes don't cost lives.
I’d love a source indicating it’s permissible to override the RWSL for emergency vehicles. In all training materials I’ve seen for pilots, it’s clear that an ATC clearance does NOT permit overriding the RWSL indication precisely for this scenario where ATC inadvertently provided a bad clearance. The direction to pilots is to query the controller to give them a chance for a second look and trap the error of the incorrect clearance. I linked the FAA page in another post where it provides direction to ground vehicles as well. Tomorrow I will have more time to research but this might be one of those things buried in a difficult to find Advisory Circular or something.
Emergency vehicles almost always can override/ignore warning devices (think firetrucks running red lights) which can cause "fun" for some value of "death/dismemberment/vehicle loss".
Airport emergency services are presumably trained in this, but since a plane cannot stop easily (or not at all on takeoff after V1), I seem to remember the general rule is that even emergency vehicles with lights and sirens on give way to planes, and don't enter runways without permission from the tower.
In the audio released by the BBC, the fire truck DID get permission from the tower to cross something, I can't tell if it was the runway in question. However, to cross the red runway lights if lit, you normally need that spelled out too something like "truck one, cross four delta, cross red lights". This did not happen on the BBC audio, which could mean one of many things.
They got clearance, which was overruled by a STOOOP!
The guy was alone operating 2 frequencies, had an emergency of another aircraft going on… is not so easy as many commenters from the armchair are insinuating
>The guy was alone operating 2 frequencies, had an emergency of another aircraft going on… is not so easy as many commenters from the armchair are insinuating
I'm not saying its easy, I'm actually specifically saying it's such a hard job we should have automated most of it away ages ago. If the only thing stopping an accident like this is an ATC employee, this _will_ happen in the future.
They came up with rail signals long before the idea of a computer even existed. It's hard to believe voice only communication of routes and runway access is the best path forward. Especially when passenger airliners are involved.
Automation emboldens policy makers to reduce human count because of the perceived increase in safety. This results in less eyes and brains monitoring for situations of automation failure or abnormalities. The corner stone of aviation safety over the last several decades has been having multiple, highly trained and experienced operators on station monitoring aviation systems to catch those moments when something goes wrong. Additionally, a culture where those operators are encouraged to speak up and be heard when something goes wrong without fear of being reprimanded is essential.
Automation is fantastic. We use it extensively in aviation. However, the long tail of 9s in reliable requires constant vigilance and oversight because anything that can go wrong will.
Who's entering the signal that the runway is locked? What if they screw up?
There are so many failure modes with vehicles and planes using the same tarmac that I fail to see how anything would be worth developing here that doesn't eliminate that requirement altogether.
Ah, okay. I suppose it'll be part of the investigation but I wonder if the RELs were indiciating an unsafe runway which prompted the firetruck to ask or if they always ask for permission. Either way, I think my assesment is still correct: there are a lot of edge cases that neither lights nor humans are going to stop. O'Hare apparently has tunnels/underpasses for ground vehicles to use which seems basically foolproof for avoiding collisions like this.
They got clearance and then obviously didn't bother to look outside, which is a dereliction of the basic responsibility of operating any vehicle on an airport surface. Clear left, clear right, then cross the hold short line.
(See my other comment below if you're tempted to say something about visibility.)
They could not see, because delta crosses in diagonal to the runway, such that the plane comes from behind (and the right side) so the driver has no chance to see. The truck was moving fast which is ok, because you want to clear the runway as fast as possible.
It doesn't matter what the orientation of the taxiway is. If you can't see when you're stopped straight on the taxiway centerline, you stop at an angle instead.
There is never an excuse for not visually clearing a runway before entering it.
From where I'm sitting, it's not really "the fault" of ATC (even though it is) simply because I'm not trusting enough of ATC even when they're on "my side".
When cleared across a runway I'm still going to be looking in all directions, and proceed as fast as I can. I also look both ways at railway crossings even if the guards are up and silent.
No. it wasn't. Delta crosses 04 in diagonal, so basically they should have taken the head out of the window and look behind. They had the clearance, so they just tried to cross. The problem is for some reason they did not hear the "Truck 1 stop" call.
> If an Air Traffic Control clearance is in conflict with the Runway Entrance Lights, do not cross over the red lights. Contact Air Traffic Control and advise that you are stopped due to red lights. (ex.: "Orlando Ground, Ops 2 is holding short of runway 36 Left at Echo due to red lights").
Airports are highly controlled environments unlike typical motor vehicle roadways and generally the same rules apply for aircraft, vehicles, and equipment on airport surface movement areas. From all sources I can find, if the RWSLs were working they should have been red and nobody should have entered the runway without further clarification from ATC.
All vehicles can override/ignore warning devices. Doesn't make it right. Emergency vehicles should not override/ignore train or plane crossings. Trains and Planes don't care about flashing lights. Crossing an active runway requires clearance for safety.
In this case, from the available information, the drivers of the fire truck thought they were cleared, and proceeded to cross while a plane was cleared to land. I'm not familiar with ATC ground radio to know if they were actually cleared or not, but it seems clear that that the drivers thought they were cleared.
You can't just throw software at this. It's a complex system that involves way more than just an airplane and someone in a tower. Systems engineering, human factors, and safety management systems are the relevant disciplines if you'd like to start reading up. In addition there are decades of research on the dynamics between human operators and automation, and the answer is never as simple as "just add more automation." Increased reliance on automation can paradoxically decrease safety.
CPDLC is already being deployed domestically. It's currently available to all operators in en route segments.
All runway incursions at towered airports are reported, classified according to risk, and investigated.
On the flipside, look at the success of TCAS. It doesn't have a perfect operational history. It hasn't completely eliminated midairs, either. But it took a relatively rare event and further reduced the frequency by about a factor of 5.
I wouldn't be so quick to rule out that there's some kind of relatively easy technological double check that could greatly reduce incidents. The fact that we've not gotten there despite years of effort to reduce runway incursions doesn't mean that it's not possible.
TCAS is fantastic - absolutely stellar example of effective automation.
But calling a replacement of major ATC functions with software a "simple fix" is a perfect illustration of why this is a bad idea. Nothing about human-rated safety-critical software is simple, and coming at it with the attitude that it is? In my view, as an experienced pilot, flight instructor, spacecraft operator, and software engineer, that thinking is utterly disqualifying.
Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL, which didn't prevent this accident.
I don't know. At some point, you need to do all the systems engineering. But "why not just ......" is a perfectly reasonable place to start looking at a problem and sometimes the answers really are that simple.
> Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL
It'll be interesting to hear why RWSL didn't help, as it is supposedly deployed at LGA.
There are three categories of runway incursion types: operator/ATC error, pilot error, pedestrian/vehicle. Even if someone 'knows' that they need to "hold short runway 12", they can still have a brain fart and go through the hold short line.
Unless you want to argue that all vehicles taxiing have to operate (SAE Level 4) autonomously?
Yeah but TCAS works inside each airplane. ATC (and ground operations) require coordinating across multiple types of aircraft, at airports across the world, with high precision AND humans in the loop (there are A LOT of edge cases).
This is a REALLY hard problem that the US cannot solve alone. It would require extensive global coordination.
Not insurmountable, but this is not something you can easily roll out piecemeal. If even a single aircraft lacks the compatible equipment you're back to the existing system.
"each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed"
I feel the same way about close calls on the road, especially ones involving a vehicle and a vulnerable road user like a pedestrian or cyclist. Way too many lives being saved by a person jumping out of the way at the last minute who shouldn't have had to do so, and then cops and bureaucrats shrugging with "well what do you want us to do, the numbers don't show enough fatalities here for it to be worth fixing" and later when someone actually does die it becomes "this is a horrible tragedy that no one could have seen coming, let's focus on thoughts and prayers rather than accountability that could lead to structural change."
As a former bike commuter who used to send helmet cam vids to my local police, I definitely got back that response a bunch of times, "we have the plate but not the face of the driver, so it's not actionable for us, even to issue a warning".
Which has always seemed a little nuts, like in case of hit and run it would definitely be possible to take action based on a plate alone, both for police and insurance purposes. Unless the registered owner can point to the not-them person who was driving their car at that time, then it was them. Or it was stolen, but either way there will be a clear paper trail.
>Which has always seemed a little nuts, like in case of hit and run it would definitely be possible to take action based on a plate alone, both for police and insurance purposes. Unless the registered owner can point to the not-them person who was driving their car at that time, then it was them. Or it was stolen, but either way there will be a clear paper trail.
All that creates a mountain of work and man hours that any police department in America would likely put on low priority.
Basically our legal system is too forgiving and the possibility that someone stole their car (even if it was a friend) and returned it 20 minutes later exists, and therefore it's on the police to prove it wasn't.
And the law is pretty hard to change since it would change it to 'guilty until proven innocent'.
How would you exactly "digitize"? While that sounds like a nice idea in theory it's the same as "digitizing" road traffic.
In the end the air traffic system is a highly complex but also a highly reliable system, especially when you compare accident rates.
I am sure the working conditions of ATC staff might be improved - but being both a pilot and a programmer, I know that there is no easy digitalization magic wand for aviation.
I'm sure the NTSB report will cover why this didn't stop the accident. Presumably either the system wasn't working as-expected, or the fire truck proceeded despite the warning lights since they had clearance from the controller.
The system is only advisory at present, so if the truck did see a warning light and proceeded anyway, they were technically permitted to do so.
>In the end the air traffic system is a highly complex but also a highly reliable system, especially when you compare accident rates.
1700 incursions a year, and other articles mentioning multiple near misses a week at a single airport [1]. It is safe in practice, likely largely due to the pilots here also being heavily trained and looking for mistakes, but it seems a lot like rolling the dice for a bad day.
>I am sure the working conditions of ATC staff might be improved - but being both a pilot and a programmer, I know that there is no easy digitalization magic wand for aviation.
I didn't say it'd be free. Just hard to believe radio voice communication is the best way to go.
> While that sounds like a nice idea in theory it's the same as "digitizing" road traffic.
Traffic lights instead of mad max intersections are better.
Then there's subway Automatic Train Control.
I don't know that Air Traffic Control staff don't have computer systems for establishing which plane owns what airspace. They at least did do it manually already following specific processes, so it can be at least augmented and a computer can check for conflicts automatically (if it isn't already). And, sure, ATC could still use radio, but there could be a digital standard for ensuring everybody has access to all local airspace data. Or maybe that wouldn't help.
Your ground vehicle wanting to cross a runway could have the driver punch "cross runway 5" button (cross-referenced with GPS) and try to grab an immediate 30 second mutex on it. The computer can check that the runway is not allocated in that time (i.e. it could be allocated 2 minutes in the future, and that would be fine).
But, as pointed out elsewhere, obviously some of this is already present: stop lights are supposed to be present at this intersection.
It's already digitized, he's clueless. The ATC knows where vehicle was and where the plane is going, it looks as simple case of mistake or maybe not watertight enough procedures
I'm sure they've started all of this a few times over the past decade. The problem is in the US if you can't start and finish a project like that in less than 2 years then it's effectively dead in the water. The last time we "modernized" ATC was closer to the 90's than today, when there was still some general political will to make our government agencies modern instead of tearing them to pieces.
Automating ATC is similar to automating flying in general. Even if it's possible to automate 99% of 99% of flights, including even takeoff and landing, commercial flights still have two pilots because if things start to go wrong there's just so many edge cases that you can't easily write automation to handle all of them. Same thing for ATC, except even worse. They still have control towers because controller eyeballs still work even if nothing else does, if ground radar fails, or if a vehicle doesn't have an ADS-B transponder, or if a crash eliminates the radios, etc. There's just so many edge cases that making automation be able to handle everything is extremely difficult
But still, even if you need humans when things go wrong, automating away all the work for when things go right is a massive load off those people. There will always be failures, the goal is fewer failures, and especially eliminating known failure modes.
This isn’t really ATC though connected. I was just watching a presentation from Royal Schiphol today about a lot of the automation of the airport they’re putting in place as part of admittedly long-term 2050 plans. Lots of computer infrastructure rework.
There are systems for it, just not really integrated into emergencies and ground vehicles. Mistakes also happen even if all info required to avoid is present
What you are describing is sometimes considered to be part of the mythical Cat IIIC standard. The gap between Cat IIIB and Cat IIIC is being able to fully automate the entire taxiing and other ground manoeuvring. It is widely considered to be impossible to achieve safely with current tech. It does feel like the future though.
But in the highly dynamic environment of final approach, landing, and taxiing, I doubt it would be practical. Unless we want to try autonomous 'driving' on taxiways and runways?
I'm a ground instructor and instrument rated pilot and I fly a 206 in and out of busy charlie and delta airports. I'm also a ham radio guy (WT1J) and an SDR dev. I'm 100% with you on this, but the amount of inertia you're dealing with here approaches infinity. And there are some weirdly strong arguments for not changing things.
We use AM simplex radio. That means everyone hears everyone else and that helps everyone build a situational awareness picture. Secondly we use AM because if someone transmits over someone else it makes a squealing noise so you know it happened. Also AM propagates pretty well.
Most people on HN could design a pretty good digital replacement in a few minutes - and no doubt some have been suggested in these comments. But its instructive to understand a bit about aviation history. The liability risk carried by aircraft and avionics manufacturers at one point go so bad that we stopped making general aviation planes in the USA. Then that liability was limited to a very small extent by GARA, and we had what we call the 'restart' of manufacturing.
So the idea of introducing a new mandatory replacement (not addition like ADS-B) for AM comms has a lot of resistance from quite a few areas: Manufacturers don't want to have to make the capex to reinvent and recertify new equipment. The US has a lot of old planes due to the lack of innovation because of the liability issue - and so those old planes all need a retrofit and pilots don't want to spend that money. Avionics for certified aircraft is already horrifically expensive. Legislators don't want to take on the risk of an incident attached to a bill they sponsored. And then there's the practical matter of now having two systems - the legacy AM comms, and the modern one that some have and some don't and the split in situational awareness between those populations.
So while full-duplex is seductive, and digital is seductive, and satellite seems like the obvious endgame - the reality of transitioning is very difficult.
Vehicles are listening to the same audio the pilots are, so they have the same mental picture of what's going on. Last week I talked to a maintenance vehicle at KBLI directly from the air because he was on a runway I needed to land on, at an untowered field. He cleared it, I landed, and he went about his business. So the system works pretty well most of the time.
I think the root of the issue here is actually something else. Firstly there is a lot of dissatisfaction among NATCA members (ATC union) towards their union, and the view seems to be that the union could be doing a lot better job of lobbying for their workers. You can visit /r/atc or /r/atc2 on reddit to learn more.
Secondly, the USA has fallen into a nasty trap where our government has positive incentives to choreograph shutdowns to get our congress members and senate members the face time that they crave. So there is a negative incentive to resolve a shutdown. Rather let it get hot, let it play out, and maybe you'll be the one to appear to save the day to your constituents. The trouble with this is that the department that creates one of the highest risks for civilians in a very visible way, is the FAA and the controllers in particular. So they have become a political football. And they're in an extremely stressful job without pay. And that's a very big problem.
You're seeing this play out in a growing adversarial relationship between the NTSB (e.g. DCA) and FAA, with NTSB tearing FAA a new one recently for DCA - and rightly so. I think that's led to more demotivation at FAA which hasn't helped.
So the situation is spiraling out of control. We have controllers who are overworked, who regularly don't get paid, and a union not doing the greatest job at advocating for them. Along with the recent cuts in government funding across the board.
It's frustrating for pilots. The best we've been able to do is bring our local TRACON folks stacks of free pizza, both in Colorado and Seattle. But that's obviously a token gesture. I don't see a way out of it. To be perfectly honest. And it's very frustrating because the amount of good work that FAA does, is quite startling. You'd be amazed how much data they produce including real-time feeds that are freely available to devs like us. Once you get into the IFR world and start looking not just at approach plates, but the review and updating process of each, the other maps that are produced, the real-time sitrep data that they're producing - it's really quite something what they've accomplished. And the world looks to FAA for its lead in aviation. We were the first to pioneer powered fixed wing flight, after all. I can only hope there's a way out of this.
> There's 1700+ runway incursions a year in the US alone, each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed. Like when an accident occurs.
How many runways crossings are there in a year? How much is "1700+" a percentage of that total?
A "runway incursion" is a very broad term that includes everything from this accident to a single engine Cessna moving past the hold short line prematurely at a quiet airport.
FAA defines it as "Any occurrence at an aerodrome involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on the protected area of a surface designated for the landing and take off of aircraft." [0]
Many runway incursions run no risk of any accident, but are still flagged as issues, investigated, and punished if appropriate.
The point is that it doesn't matter what percentage of the total they are, it's that 1 is too high without adequate explanation (the Gimli Glider caused vehicles to be guilty of a runway incursion by turning an abandoned runway into an active one, for example).
And the cost of investigating 1,700 should be within the budget.
Of course it matters. All of these entities have limited budgets and personnel and almost unlimited ways they could apply those resources. They have to choose what to chase and they do that by deciding how big of a problem it is.
If 1,700 is a huge percentage of runway uses (obviously it isn't but grant it, say at a single airport), then it's mandatory it be investigated because it's so huge.
If 1,700 is a minuscule fraction of all runway uses (as it likely is) then investigating it should be a proportionally minuscule amount of the budget.
Given there are ~45,000 flights per days in the US (and so aircraft and vehicles would move hither and fro around an airport for each flight), 1700 feels like a small number.
Exactly - it's a small number and should be investigated, because if we reduce the number of all incursions, we reduce the number of collisions (and fatalities).
They are classified as operation/ATC error, pilot error, and vehicle/pedestrian error.
Human can misspeak or mishear instructions, but if they were communicated and understood correctly (a read back was correct), but the pilot had a 'brain fart' and went forward instead of stopping, how do we eliminate brain farts?
NOTE-
Previous reviews of air traffic events, involving LUAW instructions, revealed that a significant number of pilots read back LUAW instructions correctly and departed without a takeoff clearance. LUAW instructions are not to be confused with a departure clearance; the outcome could be catastrophic, especially during intersecting runway operations.
The older term was "hold short runway X" and that was too close to "hold runway X" - the first meant do NOT enter the runway, the second meant enter and line up but do NOT takeoff.
You can't know how big of a problem it is without an investigation. Frequently, the initial "obvious" cause of a collision or incursion turns out to be a multi-layered set of failures. Tightening up procedures or recognizing a previously overlooked defect in the systems makes us all safer and should be prioritized.
We talk about Vision Zero for streets. Vision Zero is actually achievable in aviation.
There is a certain class of person who will take something simple like, say, brake lights on a car, and extrapolate it out to industrial control systems of something incredibly complex with demanding safety requirements and "observe" "it can't be that hard can it?"
I remember a debate a year or two ago about a plane ignoring instructions (IIRC it had changed frequencies) and had taxiied onto a runway when a plane was landing. Luckily the landing plane saw this and do a go around so nobody was harmed.
In the aftermath, there were similar complaints to yours. "Why can't they just have lights to block planes when a departing or landing plane was using the runway?" without thinking through how any of that works. For a start:
- How do you allocate that a runway is "in use"?
- If ATC does it, what if they fail to turn the system on?
- What if turning it on or off fails?
- What if it gets stuck on or off? How do you fix it? Are there procedures for ATC to override it anyway?
- There are multiple entry points to a runway. What if they're in different states?
- What company si going to sell such a system and accept liability?
- What training requirements will be needed for ATC and the pilots?
- What do you do if a pilot goes ahead and ignores it?
I think people can't think beyond cars. Cars have had unimaginable effort put into them so they can only operate within a certain window. Even then they require maintenance.
But as soon as you scale up to industrial safety and control systems, a power plant, the engine on a ship, etc you will end up with a bunch of controls where the people using them need to be skilled operators and it is essentially impossible to eliminate mistakes with automation and IT systems. You will need overrides. You will need redundancies. You will need to end up doing things nobody has ever considered before and have to rely upon training, education and experience to go beyond the envelope. That's just how it works.
You seem to be giving too much credit to the singleton design pattern. We know exactly how well that works on a modern, multi-tasking, preemptible operating system (hint: not well at all).
> That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point.
Voice communication is insane? I suspect you are ignorant of what it is like to actually fly a large aircraft into a busy airport. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment.
Voice communication has the advantage is that it can be used without taking off hands and attention off controls. Digital solution would require using device.
Voice communication can still be used for anything out of the ordinary despite automating the common case.
Almost all voice transmissions are routine instructions/clearances from ground to air, with the pilots reading them back to reduce the chance of errors. In fact, this already exists and is in wide use in (at least) the US, EU, and in transoceanic airspace.
Of course, now you have two systems that can fail, and reducing reliance on the older one can easily cause automation complacency (which is a well-researched source of errors) and require more frequent refresher courses if the skill is not practiced on a continuos basis.
I suspect that that these are the reasons it's not commonly used for approach and tower operations: There's a lot more spontaneous and/or nonstandard stuff happening in those flight phases, and as you say you don't want a pilot's eyes on a tiny screen/keyboard instead of on their instruments or out the window.
Listening to some recent close call ATC tapes, yes, it seems absolutely insane to manage current traffic levels with the existing number of controllers over voice.
I don't doubt that it's a very safe system with enough slack allowing for intentional redundancy. But as it is, some of these controllers seem to be limited by their ability to pronounce instructions, leaving absolutely no margin for error and presumably very little room for conscious thought.
ATC recording on https://www.liveatc.net/recordings.php
Fire truck was cleared to cross and then told to stop. I'm not sure if they were the only controller working at the time, they continued working after the incident which seems unusual; my understanding is normally they'd be relieved by another controller.
Which, as a non informed person but someone who needs to travel by plane, sounds absolutely insane. Was it always possible to staff that with a single person or is that a result of understaffing?
As an informed person (PPL flying single engine into smallish towered airports all the time), it is absolutely insane for an airport the size of LGA. Occasionally, you will encounter one guy doing tower and ground at very small class D airports or during not-so-busy shifts.
To play devil's advocate, ASEL into small deltas is significantly different than receiving full-stop IFRs late at night.
This small mistake (and it is initially small, just catastrophic) is a system breakdown, not necessarily a staffing breakdown. Though staffing is definitely a wider issue in the NAS.
Edit to add: looking at this incident closer it appears LGA was busy enough to make a single tower/ground controller an obviously bad plan. Still, systemically, there's enough low hanging fruit here, like ADSb in for the airport trucks or hold short line guard lights. I hope the takeaway isn't just "don't have controllers make mistakes".
Yea, if you listen to the ATC audio, you can hear that in addition to the normal high workload of handling both ground and tower, this guy had an emergency aircraft on a taxiway to deal with, too. A lot of holes in the swiss cheese lined up, but one of them clearly is ATC workload.
Understaffing is no excuse at an airport that size with that kind of airspace. Somebody high up in the food chain with integrity and authority should be closing the runway if staffing is so low that it becomes unsafe. And I'm no expert, but having enough staff for separate air and ground control seems like a minimum safety requirement unless it's a tiny airport.
I fly out of a small-to-medium-sized airport in Canada and I've never seen it happen there. The idea of one person being responsible for both tower and ground in the busiest airspace in the US is absolute insanity.
YVR has had flow control every day for years now, and closes the class C to VFR traffic on virtually any sunny day now, due to staffing problems. It's been happening since long before COVID, but that made it much worse. The controllers simply refuse to take on more traffic than they can safely handle.
Lots of pilots here have been complaining for years about how the US controllers are so much better, they can handle much more traffic, etc.
Speaking very generally, it's not unusual at all. Tower and ground are combined all the time - at smaller airports.
Should they be combined at LGA when both (crossing) runways are in use, and there's an incident on the field? (The fire trucks were on their way to investigate a smell on the flight deck of another airplane that had to abort takeoff twice.)
That seems unusual to me. It’s common at smaller airports, but for a big one like LaGuardia I’d think tower and ground would be two different controllers, even lateish at night like this was. I know there has been a staffing problem for controllers in the NY area for some time.
It's not unusual for airports to reduce staff at night, and the incident occurred at 23:36 local time. Even at a very large airport in a very busy traffic area, one controller can probably handle normal operations at this hour.
The obvious problem is what happens when operations become abnormal. ATC shouldn't be staffed for normal operations, because then abnormal operations lead to catastrophe. Welcome to last night: the weather is bad, which causes a plane to abort two takeoffs, which causes that plane to need emergency services. This increases the controller's workload beyond his capacity, so he accidentally clears the emergency vehicle to cross in front of a landing airplane, and they can't see the airplane because the weather is bad, so they follow the instruction and promptly get hit with an airplane.
When some bad weather can be the difference between "this is fine, one controller can handle it" and two dead pilots, you need to be staffed for bad weather.
Reddit aviation groups are full of professional pilots, saying how terrified they of flying into La Guardia or JFK, recounting close calls, with one saying how he avoided those two for 10 years...
But think of the money they saved by not having to pay another air traffic controller! A controller's yearly salary is the cost of about 10 seconds of the Iran war, based on the recently-reported figure of $11.3B for six days.
I don't think it's money. I think it's requirements and training pipeline restraints. The system is predicated on being able to throw bodies at the problem, but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up. Personally, I didn't realize ATC as a possible career path until I was 36-- imagine my surprise when I found that I had already aged out.
The training is also not run particularly well. There's a single facility in Oklahoma that every prospective air traffic controller has to go through. I had a friend in college who graduated in the early 2010s with a four year degree in air traffic control. He waited several years for the FAA to tell him he could start training, a spot never opened up, and he moved on with his life and did something different. It's broken on a pretty fundamental level if we have a shortage of air traffic controllers but also people who want to do it can't get in.
> but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up
Which means either the compensation is insufficient to attract and retain the necessary number of qualified individuals, or the FAA lacks the resources to train an appropriate number of qualified individuals. Either way, it's about money.
Who would want to work that job once they find out what the day-to-day is like? I had an intern who looked at that out of the Air Force but he found out what you get paid and what the expectations are for the job and he figured he'd try his luck on something easier and better-paying like life-preserving medical devices. On a related note, why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?
I know this is a throwaway comment, but I can't let it pass.
> why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?
We're currently doing school visits for our kid, in a low-performing school district, and the teachers and administrators we've met have been impressive. I've worked in education, and visited a lot of schools in another professional capacity, so I know the questions to ask, and things to look for. I have no illusions about there being absolutely terrible teachers out there (and I'll tell you some horror stories, if you'd like), and doubtless any (hypothetical) bad teachers at those schools are being kept away from prospective parents, but your statement is hyperbolic in the extreme. The problems in the US school system are legion, but "every single teacher is crap" is not remotely true.
It’s not a money thing. It’s a shortage of people who are mentally able to do the job mixed with terrible hours and early forced retirements. ATC school has a failure rate of over 50 percent.
It's partially a money thing. ATC is under-compensated. They'd get more - and more talented - people interested if the money made up for the stress, hours, and early forced retirement.
Or increased their hiring funnel. Air traffic controller applicants must be under 31 years old for initial hire, which rules out a lot of potential hires.
There is no "the" issue in airline accidents. There are always multiple factors, and all of them had to happen in order for the accident to occur.
Understaffing is absolutely a factor. Had tower and ground not been combined, the erroneous clearance probably wouldn't have been issued.
The ARFF truck not complying with the stop instruction is absolutely a factor. Had they heard and complied, the accident wouldn't have happened.
And there are likely additional factors that will come out in the investigation.
I recommend reading some final aviation accident reports from the NTSB to learn more about how these investigations proceed and what kinds of conclusions and recommendations they include.
Other trucks slow down, but truck 1 does not even try to slow down. I'd also argue that driving so quickly that you cannot maintain control is its own problem. Getting to an emergency 20 seconds later almost never matters as much as arriving safely.
> I'm not sure if they were the only controller working at the time, they continued working after the incident which seems unusual; my understanding is normally they'd be relieved by another controller
I remember late last year, couple of months ago, US ATC controllers were without pay but forced to work anyways (similar to TSA I suppose, although I don't think they were forced, but volunteered to work without salary), is that still the situation? Couldn't find any updates about that the situation been resolved, nor any updates that it's ongoing, if so though it feels like it'd be related to the amount of available controllers.
The US has had trouble keeping enough controllers. It's a skilled but extremely stressful job, and so retention would always be difficult but the US also works hard to make it suck more than it should, and of course the over-work from not having enough people makes that even worse.
But no, AIUI only things that were somehow deemed part of "Homeland Security" are frozen, the TSA are part of Homeland Security but the ATC are under the FAA. So this particular partial government funding lapse wasn't causal, at least directly.
Specifically, Reagan made a point to cut our nose to spite our face just to not pay ATC workers more money. For political and Ideological reasons.
So why the fuck would any talented individual choose to go work for the "Get an example made out of you" department, on top of the horrific stress of the actual job!?
The idea of a union that "isn't allowed" to strike is a joke. Next will be a union that has a max membership of 1!
ATCs weren't exactly forced to work: they aren't slaves and are free to quit any time. But if they didn't show up for assigned shifts even though they weren't getting paid then they were subject to disciplinary action including termination. Some of them called in sick, or took on temporary second jobs to bring in some cash (obviously a bad thing from a fatigue management standpoint). After the government shutdown they were paid in arrears for all of the hours they worked. It's crazy that Congress plays political games with essential services like ATC.
The budget was signed Feb 3 this year to fund most of the govt (excepting DHS) through September 2026. ATC were not paid from Sept 30, 2025 until Feb 4, 2026. They receive back pay. They are also supposed to get a raise and funds set aside to hire 2500 more ATC but that is currently held up in the DHS funding fight.
Utterly unqualified to suggest any causes (wait for the NTSB report on that), but couple compounding factors I've read elsewhere to begin to understand the situation and context:
- Another plane was out of position, grabbing some attention of the controller
- Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
- The colliding plane didn't have "explicit" landing clearance, but a "follow previous plane and land the same way unless told otherwise" implicit landing clearance. In Europe, planes need an explicit landing clearance, the act of granting it may have brought attention to the runway contention. US implicit system (arguably) is a bit more efficient, debate will now be is it worth it (pilots are now required to read back instructions because of past blood... will this result in same thing?)
- This was around midnight and apparently a little foggy, making visual contacts harder
Remember folks, disasters like this are rarely caused by a single factor. NTSB reports are excellent post-mortems that look at all contributing factors and analyze how they compounded into failure. Be human here.
> Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
"stop stop stop, truck 1 stop stop stop" I mean maybe it was ambiguous for half a second but he pretty quickly said "truck 1 stop". I guess we'll have to wait for the sync up to see if it was too late to stop by then
In Europe is illegal to capture and publish ATC. I don't understand why. Anyway I do not know what are you comparing.
From pilot friends, in best case I would say a big “depends” in some countries are very unprofessional, in others very professional (anyway total unfair generalization). There were already accidents because of that, for example because the twr communicated with locals in non english, so not everybody was at the same page.
I read elsewhere that the plane was only going 24mph when it hit the truck, and I didn't understand how the collision could have been that damaging, but I wasn't taking into account how much momentum a plane would have at that speed. From the video, it seems like a plane moving on the ground acts less like a car or truck and more like a very delicate freight train when it hits something.
Maybe they were talking about the truck going 24mph, but the plane is clearly going WAY faster than that.
I'm not completely sure but it seems like the runway entry lights are red which very clearly indicates the runway is in use. They should have known better.
Captain Steve breakdown: https://youtu.be/Hx-GFeErXD8?si=iND_BkDrtGNapB7Q His videos are pretty insightful and always respectful. Highly recommended. Expect him to have new videos as more information becomes available.
Can we please not promote captain Steve? He is regarded as a pompous ambulance chaser in aviation video circles. Blancolerio is a much better resource. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnSGMPaJ2OM
I like his videos, I'm not in 'aviation circles' and I find his videos both educational and I like his demeanor. Do appreciate the link to Blancolerio, I hadn't heard of him (I'm not super into aviation videos). De gustibus et coloribus :)
Emergency vehicles were en route to another emergency in progress on the other runway. Sadly it sounds like a fire truck was cleared to cross the active runway moments before the CRJ landed. By the time the controller realized that mistake it was too late.
It was the “truck and company” that was cleared to cross. That’s probably 5+ vehicles you can see following the lead truck that were all approved. All while the jet was on short final. That controller lost situational awareness due to task saturation as a result of emergency aircraft on taxiway parallel to runway 13.
He said "Frontier 4195 stop there please". Then "stop stop stop stop truckon" By the time he clearly tells "truck 1" to stop, they're already entering the runway. Sounds like a bit of confusion.
I'm very, very curious about whether the ARFF crew visually cleared the runway and final before crossing the hold short line. It's standard procedure for flight crew to do this, specifically to mitigate the risk of ATC errors.
Reports are there were fog and rain at La Guardia at the time of the incident. They were on a short final, and it’s entirely possible they were not visible to the fire truck’s crew.
I have over 1,000 hours as PIC in the NY area alone, in all seasons and all weather, and I was in the region last night, awake when the accident happened. LGA was reporting 4SM -RA BR FEW045 BKN090 OVC110 at the time of the accident. The weather wasn't anywhere close to what I'd call "bad" here. Sprinkles and some high clouds.
I can almost guarantee you the airplane was visible from taxiway D.
I want to agree, and it almost certainly seems like the case but visibility can be vary widely by position. So just because the camera was about as far away from the collision as the plane would have been when the truck was entering the runway, it doesn't mean the plane was visible to the firetruck.
Yes ARFF should still look before crossing, but the weather wasn’t great with limited visibility and thus even if they looked it’s possible they didn’t see anything.
Was curious if ground vehicles at airports also use transponders to communicate position to the radio tower, and it turns out the FAA put out a report last year on potential solutions to avoid this exact situation:
The only negative I can think of is that it will generally involve accepting and responding to clearances on short final. I think adding more tasks to that critical stage of flight probably increases danger a little. Especially for low time student pilots like myself. That's particularly relevant in the U.S. because we have a higher percentage of student and private pilots than most of the world.
Overall, though, I'm fully convinced this would be safer.
Transponder doesn't alter the laws of physics for the landing plane you just cut off. I guess it gives ATC a ~5sec jump on telling some other flight to go around.
I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
> I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
I highly doubt that any system would intentionally give ground vehicles of any kind special treatment on an active runway.
The trajectory of the plane is obvious enough that it should be able to predict where it will likely be in 30 seconds or a minute. You can't cheat physics, if it is going down in direction of runway, it is landing or at worst will do go-around, so the services should be alterted runway is no-go automatically
It was night time so idk how obvious it would be that a plane is approaching when you're in a firetruck and probably have a million others things going on that all necessitate your attention as well.
> Captain and first officer are reported to have died in the accident, two fire fighters on board of the truck received serious injuries, 13 passengers received injuries.
He asked the truck to stop multiple times. That's got to be so stressful and annoying - knowing you asked the truck to stop, but for whatever reason the command wasn't received.
The shortage of ATC staff dates back to the Clinton Administration. It’s just hard to attract people into a 5+ year training program for a very stressful job where you might get bounced near the end with no payout and no transferrable job skills.
No the shortage goes back to Regan when their justified strike was busted. It ended the PATCO “union” and was a negative turning point for labour unions in general.
I think you mean Reagan. He removed the union for the ATC not Clinton.
Honestly, you can generally just blame Reagan for about anything. A presidency about weaking labor, strengthening Iran, and ballooning the deficit is uh never going to leave good traces.
Reagan did the right thing in that case. Government employees should never have collective bargaining rights. Public employee unions are contrary to the interests of taxpayers.
Over the course of the past year, I think we've seen more evidence that the federal workforce's collective bargaining rights aren't strong enough. Workers' employment contracts are being ignored, employees are being threatened, constructively terminated, all in an attempt to enact RIFs without following the law.
Things are happening to the federal workforce right now that aren't even legal in the private sector.
You have to have your contract violated for a significant amount before you can notionally afford to hire a lawyer to fight it out. Below 5 figures it doesn't make much financial sense to do that for most people, so they just eat it instead. It's how a lot of "theft of wages" and other mistreatment happens so often. Lawyers don't take those cases for free, and court isn't free either. And you're not going to instantly appear at the top of the docket for something small like that especially if the government buries you in procedure. They can do that for years.
But sure, yeah you can seek redress through the courts.
The result of some of the issues at hand might not even be damages, but simply to realign policies with what the law requires.... which may no longer be relevant for someone who lost a job a year ago and has since moved on out of necessity.
And this admin doesn't simply stop an initiative when courts block them, they find a new "creative interpretation" to do the same thing, and carry on for however long it takes the next trial to happen.
Suing the federal government solo is an insurmountable task for most people -- even more so while they're being constructively terminated. Employee unions have been suing on their workers behalf over the past year, but the executive branch can drag out federal trials for a lot longer than people can stay without a job.
People complain about police unions all the time, it's just their complainants don't overlap much with the people who complain about private sector unions.
Yes, absolutely. No government employees should ever have collective bargaining rights. If they want better wages and working conditions then they can advocate for those through the political process, the same as any other citizen.
Collective bargaining rights shouldn’t even be a separate thing. They’re just a natural consequence of the fact that free speech is protected and slavery is illegal. The idea of an illegal strike is bizarre.
Nope. Public employee unions bring zero value and this incident is not evidence to support such unions. Relying on unions to act as ersatz safety regulators would be stupid, just completely the wrong approach. Decisions about things like ATC procedures, staffing levels, and training standards should be the responsibility of apolitical career bureaucrats.
ATC/GTC seems like a really strong candidate for partial automation with recent advances in AI. Obviously we'd still want some expert humans in the loop for exceptional situations, but I have to imagine there's a way to significantly reduce the cognitive burden/stress for these folks.
Recent advances in AI aren't useful for routine operations in safety critical domains such as aviation because we don't know how to verify and test them. An LLM is effectively an unpredictable black box with unknown failure modes. There is opportunity for greater automation but probably based on classical deterministic programming.
Yup, it's been a problem ever since Regan (a Republican) fired over 11,000 ATC employees. And by "anyone" ITYM "republicans" again, because Democrats have been trying for years.
"”The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican,” - Barack Obama [0]
This is not a statement of Republicans and Democrats being the same, but a statement of Republicans going off the deep end in during and after Reagan.
Obama was a very moderate Democrat for his time. If you go back in time a moderate Democrat and Republican were similar because the "center" was more reasonable. Now the "center" is just people that are ashamed that they vote Republican.
If we accept that, then "government" and "Republicans" would be pretty much synonymous, so my original point stands. (Not that I accept it, but even if I did.)
Another option: they shouldn't be government employees at all. It would be much better for them to work for the actual airports themselves and be certified by the government or a private testing organization instead.
Which government? State, Federal, City, or a Port Commission? There is in fact a significant distinction between the responsibilities and capabilities of each of these levels of government and you can't lump them all together. My home airport is operated by a port commission, which is government, but the port commission's task is to operate the ports.
>There is in fact a significant distinction between the responsibilities and capabilities of each of these levels of government and you can't lump them all together.
But all private businesses have the same responsibilities and capabilities and therefore can be lumped together as one entity? The asymmetry in how you're critiquing the way this is discussed ends up revealing your bias.
> our civilization relies upon workers to shoulder the burden everyday.
Our civilization? Nah. Just that one shithole country. Greatest country in the world and they schedule a single guy to work both tower and ground frequencies at a major airport, it's almost like they're asking for this shit to happen.
And before anyone mentions understaffing, this literally one of the plethora of problems that the rest of the world figured out while the U.S. continues to act special.
As long as the cost of an accident is lower than the cost of fixing the system this will continue to happen.
This is one of many examples of why capitalism needs to be kept in check with democratic government oversight. Sometimes the financial incentives are not high enough to warrant changing the system.
I'm curious about what kind of visualization does the ATC have at the disposal about the current occupancy of the individual tarmac segments? I'd assume if an airplane is approaching for landing on a specific runway, that runway should have been clearly marked as restricted for access until the plane would actually land and clear it?
In the US, airplanes can be cleared for landing while the runway is occupied (you can be number two, three, etc. for landing and still be cleared). It's different in other countries, where you can only be issued a landing clearance if the runway is clear or anticipated to be clear before you land (e.g. the plane before you is already exiting the runway).
The way it's supposed to work, the ground controller first verifies that there are no traffic conflicts before clearing vehicles to cross an active runway.
Gravity. The aircraft is heavier at the back, where the engines are. With the nose severely damaged/missing, the centre of gravity has shifted aft, so what’s left of the nose is sticking up in the air.
I’d guess the front landing gear assembly is going to be fairly heavy, and appears to be missing. This model of plane also has its engines at the rear, not under the wing, which will move the balance to the back.
Planes typically have their center of gravity just forward of the rear wheels. This makes it easier to rotate on takeoff.
The margins are thin enough that certain planes will sometimes have people in the back get off first, before the people on the front, to avoid tipping onto the tail like this.
I have been on small aircraft where some of the larger passengers (me, at about 100kg, and a couple of other guys my size) were asked to sit a little further back for the takeoff but move up front and get off last because of the difference in balance as the fuel was used.
The entire cockpit, front toilet and galley area, and probably a front row seat have all been utterly destroyed. Unfortunately I'd be amazed if the death toll stays at two.
Are the increased number of air incidents since Dec 2024 reflective of anything real or is it more attention on something? Brigida v. USDOT comes to mind but doesn't seem relevant. I'm sure we could all construct a chain of "this thing happened that caused that which caused this" and so on, but I'm curious if someone has done the effort to see whether such a chain is defensible.
Also, did the pilots die in the collision or in some sort of aftermath? The cockpit looks absolutely smashed.
I am not aware of any data that supports the claim that there are more incidents in recent history. The safest years were, of course, the COVID-19 shutdown years, when air-travel was greatly reduced. But besides that the last couple of years has been overall safer than the years before COVID-19.
The 2025 crash near DCA, of course, absolutely spiked the number of recent commercial aviation deaths, but we haven't had any other aviation tragedies of that magnitude in more than a decade.
This can be a preventable tragedy without there needing to be a conspiracy behind it.
You can probably construct a realistic chain of failure that goes all the way back to political tomfoolery and bad air traffic control leadership/staffing decisions, but that makes the wrong people look bad, so they'll probably blame individuals further down the totem pole like the controller or pilot and call it a day.
No, absolutely not. This has nothing to do with Brigida. I'm not being vague here. When I say political tomfoolery and leadership decisions, I'm not alluding to race or discrimination. I am talking about more plausible and straightforward causes: their decisions to not modernize ATC, and to keep ATC staffed at a skeleton level for decades.
I see. Who are the “wrong people” then? Pointing fingers at politicians over lack of funding is so routine I doubt any of them would be more than mildly inconvenienced by that. Certainly not to the degree where they’d conspire to hide it.
This comes to mind how during the Boeing news scandals, commenters would confidently argue "Flying is still ridiculously safe, statistically speaking", "these things happen every day, just underreported", and "you/people are irrational for not flying Boeing". It's a very curious argument to me. Is the ATC infrastructure issue analogous or not, etc.
You can have both. I.e. complain about safety breaches, push to get back on track safety wise, but still decide to fly as it is safe enough. Guess it is being practical.
It is strange. What is importa t is, are things getting better or getting worse? As they say, it’s not the fall that kills, bit the impact. Are we falling?
Maybe US media, hardly an unbiased news source about US events, especially when hundreds of billions are flying around about incompetent massive employer and lobbyist.
Nowhere else in the world you would hear such statements. Boeings simply disappeared from Europe, those few that were here before. I am sure they are still used somewhere but I haven't flown any in past 7-8 years. Heck, I haven't seen any in South east Asia neither (but that may be due to luck).
I check this with all bookings, no way I am flying that piece of shit if I can anyhow avoid that, not alone and quadruple that with family.
That is just simply false. There are many boeings flying in europe. Just by randomly clicking around on flightradar24 I found multiple right now in the air.
It should be noted that aircraft and all other vehicle and personel movements on an airport are controlled from the airtraffic control tower by air traffic controllers or
directly by individual flaggers, as directed from the tower.
Or at least thats the way it is supposed to work, and of course the operation at a place like LaGuardia is more complex, and will have specialists and multiple zones.
What will put an extra edge on this is the
whole ICE thing, and airport chaos pulling the roof down.
> What will put an extra edge on this is the whole ICE thing, and airport chaos pulling the roof down.
How would the ICE thing cause more ground traffic collisions. Are you thinking ATC controllers are illegal immigrants and they’re going to run away during their shift? I just don’t see a connection there…
This incident caused delays and cancellations that ripple throughout an already understaffed network of TSA checkpoints. ICE presence will make airport security somehow an even worse experience for brown people.
Not the crash, but the aftermath. Passengers will be showing up for flights today, nervous with the crash on their minds, and many will then encounter untrained goons cosplaying as airport security.
The fire truck was flipped and moved to the side of the runway, this was not 24mph. 24mph is the final groundspeed recorded after the aircraft skidded off of the runway.
Per the ADSBx track the plane was at 101kts (115 mph / 185kph) just before crossing taxiway D, which would be where it hit the firetruck. It still had enough energy afterwards to reach taxiway E, 600ft away.
The results seem on the high end but they check out at first glance.
A plane is basically a flimsy tube. A firetruck is a solid brick comparatively. The plane out weighs the fire truck by a lot and out speeds it by a lot. So yeah, destroying the whole front of the plane to punt the truck it sounds about right for a 25 on 5 or 35 on 10/15 type rear ending to me. Flipping doesn't really sound that unreasonable considering that the plane made contact with the top of the truck (just by virtue of comparative height) and contact may not have been straight on. Even if it left the pavement on it's wheels airport firefighters aren't exactly who I'd bet on (they're middle of the pack) to keep the truck on it's wheels if they got surprise kicked off the road especially if there's an embankment involved.
Pause the video at 13 sec. That firetruck is awfully intact for something that allegedly got hit at high speed. Basically just a bunch of top side sheetmetal damage (concentrated to the rear, obviously). In any case it didn't even get sent hard enough to screw up the cab exterior. And on the flip side, if you keep cranking the speed up you start getting to where the plane starts looking too suspiciously intact. There's just not much room to work backwards from the apparent results and get a high difference in speed or get very high initial speeds (100 onto 75 or whatever). If the plane was going fast the truck had to be going fast too or there'd be more carnage. But if they were both going fast you'd expect more damage from the after the fact barrel roll and the plane and truck to be a little farther apart in distance.
Fire truck is filled to brim with gear and doesn't care all that much about weight, plane is the opposite of that, lightness is money, so it makes sense fire truck looks better after crash than plane
The back of a firetruck is not a working implement like a dump truck is nor is it sufficiently strong for mounting a crane or man bucket like utility bodies often are It's a bunch of sheetmetal boxes to hold stuff and cover stuff and there's a water tank back there somewhere. In the middle down low some pumps are buried. Basically don't think of it as being any more structural than a box truck body because it's not. All that stuff got shredded, obviously, since they're only really meant to bear their own weight and were subject to all the truck tossing forces here. Beyond that the truck is in pretty good shape. It's not uncommon for a good "off the highway and into the ditch" crash to rip tandems off, twist frames, etc. None of that has happened here. The plane is pretty rough, but that's expected. They are 100% tin cans. Ground equipment moving at idle speeds will absolutely shred them before the operator even feels resistance. A goose hit square on the leading edge of a small jet's wing will put a massive dent in (and apply red paint, lol).
24 sounds about right for a closing speed for plane onto truck. Whatever the baseline speed of the truck was cannot have been that high or the truck would be absolutely shredded from the barrel roll and as it stand the cab is barely pushed in.
The last recorded ground speed data of 24mph also shows a wildly different heading (going from 30deg ish to 170ish). So it probably happened after the collision and was part of its deceleration. As far as I know, the truck would have been crossing the runway so the effective speed perpendicular to the plane would be zero except for directional shear I guess.
I think you'd be surprised. The cab is quite solid because it has to conform to certain vehicle design and safety criteria (at least here in Europe).
The rest of it is made of fairly squashy aluminium box section with panels TIG welded on. There's not a lot left if one of them gets rolled, for example.
The speed was much higher per sibling comment, but also remember that kinetic energy also involves mass (planes are heavy) and the square of the velocity.
It looks like that is based on the last recorded speed from flightradar24[1] which was 21kts(24mph). The previous data points were 11kts, and 58 kts(the last point before the track deviates off the runway). I do think it is likely that the collision occurred at a speed faster than 24mph.
edit: Looking into this a bit more it looks like the plane came to a stop around crossing E while the emergency vehicle was crossing at D(based on ATC recordings). Using the following map as reference[2], the 58kts point was around E, while the previous recorded point which was just before D was 114kts.
On other hand planes are really not designed to be crashed into things. Only for limited impacts. So we might not have right comparison for relatively thin and aimed to be light structure being impacted by bulkier object.
Speed doesn't cause damage. Momentum causes damage. We understand speed, we do not understand momentum. It makes sense given our evolution.
People into boats need to understand this. Even a boat that travels no more than 4mph can crush you easily. This is why you never get on to moving boat from the front. Many people have made a mistake because speed is not high.
Tugboats bump other boats all day. Hundred thousand pound pieces of machinery bury themselves into the dirt. All this as part of normal operation. It's not that simple.
Speed, kinetic energy and acceleration are all interrelated and at the end of the day it's all forces (to some extent) and no amount of hand wringing commentary is going to replace genuine understanding of them.
/r/xyz doesnt need to fact check. Sure those are excellent subs but just being watering holes and not legal entities they can move faster. There were some wrong facts on r/aviation although it got viral so people just ploughed in with whatever news outlet they read it on.
The clearance for AC8646 to land on runway 4 is given in a sequence starting at 4:58. "Vehicle needs to cross the runway" at 6:43. Truck 1 and company asks for clearance to cross 4 at 6:53. Clearance is granted at 7:00. Then ATC asks both a Frontier and Truck 1 to stop, voice is hurried and it's confusing.
If only we could diff the BBC article (it currently says it was posted 21 mins ago which is younger than your comment…). It’s changed multiple times now without any kind of changelog or acknowledgement.
> Video footage on social media showed the aircraft, which is operated by Air Canada's regional partner Jazz aviation, coming to a rest with its nose upturned.
This just isn’t true. There’s no video of the plane coming to a rest with its nose upturned (which implies motion). The upturned nose happened only after passengers deplaned and the balance shifted.
> It had slowed to about 24mph when it collided with a vehicle from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.
This is the next part that will change. Just because some of the last broadcast data said 24mph doesn’t mean that’s the speed it was when it collided with the truck. The truck is on its side and those passengers are in hospital. The pilots are dead. The plane sustained enough structural damage to have the entire nose collapse. If the sentence is based on that broadcast data, SAY THAT instead of printing it as fact.
And with all the quotes from social media posts from key groups, link to them instead of just vaguely quoting.
EDIT:
As expected, they got rid of the above paragraph claiming the speed. It now says:
“The plane was arriving from Montreal and had landed, before colliding with the vehicle from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.”
Any of us can help log the changes by submitting revisions of the article to web.archive.org
With a fast-changing news story where vague/incomplete/conflicting details emerge in the first few hours it's not unreasonable for the first few revisions to be like that, and eventually gets fixed hours or a day later.
I think that’s what’s critical here. Post details and their sources to show that they are in flux. Don't write them as fact and then make secret edits.
Because some of them still have standards. They will correct themselves if something was wrong.
Everyone can write a comment on Reddit / make a podcast / video / whatever claiming whatever they want. Unless you already know and trust them (which requires you to be able to cross-check their information), it's potentially as useful as a random LLM hallucination. Could be brilliantly spot on, or could be completely nonsense. No way of knowing unless you already know enough. (Because even cross-checking won't necessarily save you, if you cross-check multiple bullshit sources).
Media with standards (like the BBC, Guardian, Liberation, etc.) will do their best to report truthfully (even if sometimes with some bias), and will fix their mistakes if they're caught later on or the story evolves. Independent media checking organisations have shown time and time again that there is trustworthy media, you just need to know which it is, and always take a pinch of salt. It's wild to me that people will just dismiss rags such as Fox News and relatively quality media like Guardian in the same breath.
So the truck just crosses a runway because the ground controller said it was OK? Do ground vehicle drivers not take a half a second to look both ways before crossing a runway? It would have prevented this. Safely through redundant checks.
Raining, misting. The plane may have been up in cloud cover when they looked and decided to enter the runway. Hard to judge the distance and trajectory of planes. Once the firetruck started moving, they may have seen it without time to gun it or back up.
Yes. To have to do a certification to drive on the apron. There are all sorts of rules about being careful to cross the runway. I imagine they were rushing to the 'emergency'. To hit a plane there must have been multiple mistakes. The swiss cheese thing.
Introduce a foreign object onto the runway and it will inevitably collide with an aircraft. The fire trucks aren't part of the airport traffic management system, their sudden presence is bound to lead to problems eventually.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the truck has a single radio (airplanes always have two) and was constantly switching between ATC and fire house frequencies. The probably never heard the "stop, stop, stop stop.."
It would also not surprise me if airports previously had dedicated fire services, which have since been outsourced for cost reasons.
According to this article, the air traffic controller gave the fire truck permission to cross the runway. So, it seems like they are part of the air traffic management system?
In 2026, with how much money their is in aviation, it seems wild to not have digitized this ages ago. The runway should be essentially 'locked' when in use, if they don't want screens in every ground vehicle that may cross a runway, at least display it at runway entrances.
That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point. And there's pretty much no way to make ATC's job not stressful, its inherently stressful. Taking out how much of their job is held in the current operators mind versus being 'committed' seems like low hanging fruit 30 years ago.
The whole system's just begging for human error to occur. There's 1700+ runway incursions a year in the US alone, each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed. Like when an accident occurs.
While modernizing ATC in the US may be overdue, the real issue here is that ATC in the US has been understaffed, underpaid, and overworked for a while now.
My father works ATC and his schedule has him working overtime, 6 shifts a week, including overnight shifts, meaning that there is literally not a day of the week where he doesn't spend at least some time in the tower.
If that's the reality for even half of the controllers, it's no surprise that we've been seeing more and more traffic accidents lately.
It’s also hard to hire for. Candidates for job openings must be between the ages of 21-31 years old. Yes they are legally forbidden from hiring anyone older.
https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications
Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the boiling?
> Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the boiling?
I'm Australian. In Australia, if you are forced to work overtime the rate of pay goes up, by 50% or if it's extreme, double. As a consequence "underpaid" isn't a common complaint of people working lots of overtime.
This has some negative consequences of course. If labour is plentiful you can have lots of people on hand and pay them on an hours-worked basis. The same deal applies - if you go beyond 40 hours a week their rate of pay goes up, but that shouldn't happen if labour is plentiful and management is on the ball.
But if, as in this case labour isn't plentiful, then they are going to have to fix it some other way - like paying to train more staff. What the employers can't do is offload the problem entirely onto their employees, so there are forces compelling them to get their act together.
The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US.
Workers in these jobs in the US have less protections than the private sector as they are deemed imperative to operating the country. As such it is illegal for them to strike for better wages, but they do receive 1.5x wages during their mandatory overtime work, and have a base wage over twice that of the annual median income, before their significant overtime income. I think the burn out is a bigger cause.
Things are quite DOGEy in the US.
That's true, but there are not that many jobs that have so many lives on the line as ATC.
True, few people managing lots of airplanes at the same time...
The point of the frogs boiling metaphor is the frogs in fact do not survive.
The point of using the metaphor is that something will have to give if we don't course correct.
No it isn’t. The metaphor is that if you throw a frog into already boiling water it would attempt to jump out. If you start with tepid water and increase the temperature slowly enough they don’t. Sadly this was proven through experiment in the 1800s.
It’s an argument that if you make changes slowly enough people won’t notice.
In the experiment you mention, before they put the frog in the cool water, they removed its brain. Then they boiled the water. The frog did not jump out of the water because it had no brain. The experiment proved the opposite of what you are asserting.
Not really the point, but that experiment was debunked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
I have disproved this at home. Frog gets in idle hot tub. I turned up the heater. Soon, frog climbs out.
yes, and, fortunately -- even the frogs have enough awareness they actually jump out before they are boiled.
We as a society are both ATCs and plane passengers, and most often, the latter. And when an overworked ATC makes an error, we indeed may fail to survive.
In reality when these experiments were conducted the frog simply jumped out as soon as the temperature started to raise, frogs will not sit there in slowly boiling water and just die without trying to escape way before the water becomes dangerous.
Yep, in the experiment where they did not, their brains had been removed. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/07/guest...
So not to dissimilar from modern society then.
We need to combine the crabs in the bucket with the frogs in the water and I think we'll have the right metaphor.
Sadly most of us are hopeless lobster boiled by greater powers. Unlike the crabs through you still can save the other lobsters by refraining to eat them.
Well, it works with humans just fine.
Except for when it doesn't. It's not clear to me as to what you are trying to say.
None of us are jumping out of the pot. We will boil happily. An argument to the contrary needs to look outside.
Lots of people are overpaid and underworked too. Or in bullshit jobs, or both.
Not at all, the ATC situation is different. It doesn't help to try to jam a general (and wrong!) societal comment here, just diffuses responsibility.
As long as we're desperate for a job and we need to finance our lifestyle to impress the Johnsons.
It's not even to impress anyone, we need to keep roofs over our heads and food in our family's bellies
Y'all can do with a bit less of that.
Overweight/obesity combined: ~73-75% (nearly 3 in 4 adults) in the US.
It's quite a tired take that the obesity epidemic is because Americans have too much affordable access to good food. America has affordable access to terrible food and while people can keep their bellies full on that actually eating healthily is a luxury.
People who can afford crappy fast food can afford chicken breast and rice with veggies store bought and made at home. Just easier to kick back with a Big Mac and fries after work. Personal responsibility is key
“Made at home” means time. I cook 3 meals a day in my house and it’s a significant dent in other things I could be doing. The more stress I take on from work, the less effortful food I make. I have taken years in my adult life to get good enough to “throw something together” that is healthy and is something I enjoy eating and would choose over a burger. I still eat a lot of burgers.
Personal responsibility sure but that often comes with utter ignorance of the systems that people find themselves in, especially poverty and mental health. The bottom 50% own nothing, have no security, and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.
99% of people can do 48h water fast with no issues. Easy weight loss, no need for a gym or healthy food.
Try it!
Or don't. Feels good to mog people by just being normal weight.
Oh, look whose family has a roof over their head and food in their bellies!
We get it, @ExtraRoulette. You're big pimpin'.
I think we now have the answer to your query:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046401
But I don't think we should extrapolate from it.
I thought it was the avocado toast that was keeping us from owning a house.
It's simple... AI and automation will be gradually replacing everyone's job. The reason people are overworked is because they can't afford to lose their job.
I wrote this 12 years ago and it's even more true today: https://magarshak.com/blog/stop-wasting-our-time/
No that is not the issue. Runway incursions have always been a problem and many deaths have occurred.
There have been many attempts to change phraseology, teach pilots and controllers to always readback runways, etc. but nothing that actually prevents the issue from occurring entirely via automation.
The incursion was by a fire engine which was hurrying to handle yet another incident. The weather was foggy, it was raining, and the incoming plane was already low, so it was pretty hard to tell it apart from many other lights shining from the fog in the distance. It's not easy to assess the speed of motion when a fuzzy ball of light is advancing right towards you.
The pilot was given the clearance to land before the fire engine was dispatched. Apparently there was not even enough time for the crew to max out the thrust and try to lift off the strip even if they managed to notice the lights of the incoming fire engine.
Planes use a system called TCAS to prevent collisions in the sky, this system is independent of ATC and works even if ATC is not paying attention or if pilots have the wrong frequency tuned. It detects impending collisions and gives both pilots clear and automated alerts plus an action IE climb + turn to execute immediately to prevent a collision.
A similar system can and should be used for runways.
As a thought experiment, imagine how many car accidents there would be if instead of traffic lights, each person had a AM radio in their car and police officers called out over the radio which cars should proceed across the intersection. That is the unfortunate state of modern? aviation.
TCAS disables below 1,000 feet because there’s too much stuff at an airport.
I have ADS-B in my airplane and can see everything on the ground on a pretty map as if it were literally a video game. I can see landing aircraft in realtime while holding short or crossing a runway. The emergency responder should have had it in their fire truck.
The technology already exists. The problem has already been solved with an iPad and a $200 receiver. Almost certainly some BS regulation or rule was at least partially responsible here.
Why are we discussing the issue being ATC workers when the recordings make it clear that they had identified the issue and ordered the vehicle to stop? Sound like the issue is whoever was driving the truck not doing what was asked of them for whatever reason. Unless of course it was equipment failure.
The controller told the truck to proceed, before telling it to stop. That was a serious ATC error.
If the timings on the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY are accurate, it had time to cross; it seems they dawdled a bit.
Controller probably should've told them to expedite the crossing or warned that traffic was about to land, but they were managing a lot at once; tower+ground by themselves and an emergency already.
The poor guy was managing two runways and ground traffic, which is nuts.
Don't air traffic controllers get paid at a higher rate for overtime than for their 'regular hours'?
If so, doesn't the understaffing (lower # of employees) result in each employee being overpaid (paid a higher hourly rate)?
EDIT: And it seems like air traffic controllers can retire after just 20 years and draw a defined benefit pension: https://www.faa.gov/nyc-atc
It’s also the only industry that is legally allowed to practice ageism. You have to start before or up to 31 years of age. You’re out at age 56. This figures into how the benefits are structured.
You can still do contract ATC work after 56.
The RNLI also has an age limit: 45 or 55 for inshore or all weather crew.
The politicization of government budgeting has made inefficiency rife. Sometimes new allocations are done purely for brownie points and there's genuine wastage - other times cuts are made that save a penny but lose a pound in the guise of efficiency. Doge was an excellent example in just how many severance payouts for employees who were occasionally rehired due to staffing shortages it triggered.
Nurses also get paid more for night shifts, doesn't mean they're 'overpaid'
I think GP means if we're paying overtime for so many people we're wasting money vs hiring more people to work at regular pay scales.
The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?
> The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?
ATC has been a shit career prospect for a while now so no one wants to enter training.
For one it requires uprooting your entire life to live near a training center, then they send you on an apprenticeship to a random airport in the country for a few years. And since there are only so many slots in the desirable metros, most people get sent to live somewhere “undesirable” to say the least.
For two, while trainees get paid they get totally fucked during government shutdowns. Many who make it to the funnel also quit at that point. Without fundamental structural changes to how they’re trained and paid at the political level, the number of trainees will remain small.
Yes, when they work overtime they get paid more for that overtime than regular time.
The money doesn't somehow make it sustainable for the people burning out their lives. Working 7 days a week, including overnight shifts, for 20 years to collect a pension seems like WELL earned compensation.
That's seems unrelated to "we have so few" and "we enmiserate the one's we do have".
I think rahimnathwani's point was not that they get extra pay so it's fine, but that it seems economically irrational to overwork fewer staff if it's actually more expensive.
Here in Norway it's similar with doctors, they get paid a lot because they work crazy hours. But the doctors' association is fighting to keep it that way, as the old timers who didn't burn out along the way enjoys the high pay more than their spare time.
Air traffic controllers are NOT fighting to preserve the status quo.
Yes, exactly.
It's hard to argue you're underpaid if, as a result of short staffing, you're getting paid more (both in absolute terms and per unit of effort) than you signed up for.
Doesn’t this seem like the common practice in high-pension systems? You don’t use the overtime in pension calculations so it’s way cheaper to hire P people and run them on a 2x duty cycle than it is to hire 2P people and run them on a 1x duty cycle because the post retirement cost is Q in the first and 2Q in the latter.
You can’t account for overtime in pensions because the employees will conspire to force overtime for retiring employees to bounce the pension up. Just a natural risk with an entity that can’t go bankrupt hiring people.
Wouldn’t insurance go some way to mediating this?
If the ATC is under staffed they’d charge a far higher premium since the risk of accidents is higher.
I’m not sure who would be liable for this accident, I’m guessing ATC is a government provided industry, and I understand governments don’t insure.
Why do so many jobs have this failure mode? Thinking about this should illuminate for you that funding is not the whole story.
Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.
this whole thing about funding and disaster is a big red herring. it tells me why we're talking about it, but it has nothing to do with how to solve the real, meaningful socioeconomic problem and why it keeps coming up in so many jobs. this is SO simple to understand but people resist it stubbornly. they WANT outrage. economic stuff isn't outrageous.
> tendency to strip funding until disaster happens
well there's a tendency to pass unfunded mandates too. They are two sides of the same coin. Here's another way I've heard it described, to show you that this is a "bipartisan" issue:
> the Daily Show problem. I love the Daily Show, and I think Jon Stewart is hysterical. But literally the answer to every single problem is “Congress should pass a new law.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-c...
i don't think Marc Andreessen knows everything about everything the way that he thinks that he does. but he's not wrong. you are in the really lame "Congress should pass a new law" department - i guess to increase funding? - but you know, then it becomes, i don't see why it would be "enough" funding, we don't know, they could strike anyway...
personally, i believe the problem with guilded professions like "ATC guy" come about from complex but nonetheless finite incentives. so in a narrow sense, as long as some ATC controllers want to "work more, earn more," this problem will persist, it doesn't even have to be all ATC controllers, or even many, but the proportion of "work more, earn more" to "work less, earn less" personalities predicts the scale of the issues facing buyers of the guilded profession's services. other economists have talked about this and i'm sure someone will write great Causality Revolution paper about it for ATC.
broadly I think the problem has much more to do with the lack of economic opportunity in America, that there's minimum wage and everything else, and people are very risk averse like their peers in Europe or Asia but have less of a safety net so they are much more desperate. everyone is looking to guilds to solve their problem instead of demanding that their leaders support and deliver real growth, which makes me sound like Peter Thiel, and that should tell you everything you need to know about why this problem is so hard to solve. it's all politics, not a misunderstanding of the math about maintenance or disasters or whatever the fuck.
We recently had a lot more probationary ATCs cut because of specific action by Elon Musk's DOGE, which has since then resulted in two major air disasters due to poor ATC handling, which was virtually unheard of before.
This isn't some vague problem, it's a random asshole screaming "delete! Delete! Delete!" enlisting some random college dropouts to execute it for him, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives directly attributable to those short sighted changes.
This isn't a vague problem, it's a specific asshole who is killing people so he can appear on stage with a chainsaw.
Well, there was the time Ronald Reagan fired all the ATC workers [Edit: I had the reason wrong but I still blame Reagan.]
They were already in a union (PATCO) and they were striking illegally which lead to their decertification.
What's impressive is that if you look at the issues PATCO struck over, it was basically identical to the problems ATC faces today. The problem being that everything has only gotten a lot worse for ATC controllers.
The union pretty loudly and early on pointed out major problems with that job and the response of ignoring them for 4 decades is what's driven us to the current situation.
Huh. This seems selectively simplified. At least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_....
Multiple economic write ups have concluded that Reagan’s “stick it to the upstart guy” cost us tax payers way more than it would if they’d just acceded and maybe even thrown in a gracious bonus to say thanks.
Larger sociology say the intangible cost to labor balance laws actually were much more.
Reagan’s trickle down (great euphemism for “piss on”) movement was the beginning of the demise of the GOP IMO. Disclaimed: I voted both times for him and many GOP followers.
Technically accurate.
A union that isn't allowed to legally strike when needed isn't a useful union though. The state that ATC has been in for the decades after that suggests to me that they were correct to strike.
striking illegally
How dare those peons use their economic leverage! That's only for the upper class
There’s a pretty big difference between “economic leverage” when it means your stores might be shut down for a couple of weeks vs. all of the people moving, shipping, etc. in an entire country.
A strike being inconvenient? Workers leveraging how crucial they are? The stoppage of work having massive impacts across the country? Huh, maybe the powers that be should listen to the workers when they ask nicely for better conditions instead.
Why blame Reagan? He was president 35 years ago and has been dead for 20 years.
Why not blame any number of people who held the same office between then and now who have equivalent power to fix the system?
If we assign blame to this dead guy a long time ago, then there is no accountability to be had.
Reagan fired a bunch, and then (naturally) hired a bunch to replace them. ATC work, generally speaking, for twenty years (that's when their pension vests), so twenty years after the strike there was a "cliff", with a larger than usual number of ATC retirements. As I understand it, that was anticipated at the turn of the millennium, and hiring + training ramped up to compensate, without much disruption. The next "cliff", twenty years after that (ie, that millennium tranche retiring), coincided with 1) a less than forward-looking administration, and 2) COVID. We still haven't dug our way out from under the second wave of retirements.
You're absolutely right that solutions should have been taken, but it's also true that we're picking up the pieces of a decision taken forty years ago.
Source: /r/ATC. I highly recommend lurking there.
Inadequate funding seems like the common factor across the vast majority of jobs with these failure modes.
When paying for a (rare) failure is cheaper than paying for the (constant) absence of failure, it's just natural. You know, the optimal amount of fraud in a payment system is not zero. The optimal amount of fatal aircraft incidents is not an exact substitute, bit the pressure is of the same kind, I'm afraid :(
Because we need to trust people and it is not sustainable to overstaff.
In my job we work 40h a week + oncall rotating. It works.
Can’t this whole thing being automated and let only special/unexpected situations being handled by humans ?
This was a special/unexpected situation - one of the other passenger jets declared an emergency and needed to evacuate the passengers onto the ground (there were no free gates to return). The firetruck was on it's way to assist with the emergency.
Nowhere has automated ATC because errors look like this.
That's like the argument about how we'll never (or should never) have self driving cars.
Clearly human-run ATC results in situations like this, so the idea that automated ATC could result in a runway collision and should therefore never be implemented is bad.
It's not an argument for total automation but an argument for machine augmentation. It would be fascinating just as an experiment to feed the audio of the ATC + flight tracks [1] into a bot and see if it could spot that a collision situation had been created.
You obviously wouldn't authorize the bot to do everything, but you could allow it to autonomously call for stops or go-arounds in a situation like this where a matter of a few seconds almost certainly would have made the difference.
Imagine the human controller gives the truck clearance to cross and the bot immediately sees the problem and interrupts with "No, Truck 1 stop, no clearance. JZA 646 pull up and go around." If either message gets through then the collision is avoided, and in case of a false positive, it's a 30 second delay for the truck and a few minutes to circle the plane around and give it a new slot.
[1]: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/
I'm not well-enough versed in HMI design or similar concepts, but I think this idea for augmentation could collide with alarm fatigue and the disengaged overseer problem in self-driving cars.
If we aren't confident enough in the automation to allow it to make the call for something simple like a runway incursion/conflict (via total automation), augmentation might be worse than the current approach that calls for 100% awareness by the ATC. Self-driving research shows that at level 2 and level 3, people tune out and need time to get back "in the zone" during a failure of automation.
> That's like the argument about how we'll never (or should never) have self driving cars.
The reason we won't ever have self-driving cars is that no matter how clever you make them, they're only any good when nothing is going wrong. They cannot anticipate, they can only react, too slowly, and often badly.
We automated some of the flight, we automate train signals.
We can probably semi automate runway crossing. Someone mentioned red lights when you definitely cannot cross
Imagine it were 90% automated. Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.
You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there forever, and not enough humans on the ground to manually land them.
Now image the outage is also happening at all airports nearby, preventing planes from diverting.
How do you get the planes out of the sky? Not enough humans to do it manually.
Now imagine the system comes back online. Does it know how to handle a crisis scenario where you have dozens of planes overhead, each about to run out of fuel? Hopefully someone thought of that edge case.
This.
Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage? Now do that, but with airplanes that will fall thousands of feet and kill hundreds instead of park in the middle of the street.
I'm not saying we shouldn't automate things. We should. But, it's not easy. If it was, we would have done it already.
Speaking of runway crossings specifically, you could have an automated backup, and require authorization from both ATC and the automated system to enter a runway.
It should not be automated but it should be heavily augmented.
One of the failure modes should not be “guy forgot thing”.
> Imagine it were 90% automated.
It already is.
> Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.
Planes divert to another airport, passengers grumble, end of story. Airport closures can and do happen all the time for all kinds of reasons, including weather or equipment malfunctions.
Except when the system fails regionally.
Then all the takeoffs will be cancelled, immediately reducing the workload, and planes will be manually landed.
There's exceptions all the time. They turn back because a warning light came on. They saw a deer on the runway, a passenger got up to the bathroom. There's no way that could be automatic, plus they often need atc to look at their jet to see if it's damaged.
My suggestion is to restrict the use of smaller jets like crj and turboprops. I know airports like LaGuardia can't handle the big jets either, but they could reduce the slots and require a jet that holds, say, 150 people or more. This would result in fewer flights per day to some airports, but reduce overall congestion while still serving the same number of passengers.
Overwork is an issue in general, but I don't know that it was the actual issue here.
> In audio from the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia, a staff member can be heard saying: "'Truck One, stop, stop, stop!" in the seconds before the crash.
It sounds to me like either the Cop or the Firefighter (whichever was driving) wasn't listening to ATC and this whole incident was probably completely avoidable.
EDIT: a video of the crash seems to have warning lights that the emergency vehicle ignored.
> Overwork is an issue in general, but I don't know that it was the actual issue here.
One controller working tower duties, ground movement duties, coordinating with other ATC functions off the radio, an active emergency request, and giving clearance amendments all within 2 minutes. It's insane understaffing. On top of it, there was nobody there to take over after the crash. He worked the whole cleanup for the next 30 minutes.
This is an Olympian level elite Air Traffic Controller who was setup to fail.
I've visited towers, center facilities, and have flying (and some instructing) in the San Francisco airspace for 10 years. That kind of failure is systemic way above an individual.
The audio I heard seems to show the firetruck asking if the runway is clear to cross, the controller responding in the affirmative, the firetruck confirming the affirmative, and then 7 seconds later, the controller saying STOP STOP STOP.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Kqg6sokz4
It seems like less than 2 seconds from declaring intent to cross until they are told not to cross.
The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.
From the description:
> Audio is not synced.
I think the gaps between transmissions have been trimmed, too; this isn't matching other versions of the ATC audio, such as [VASAviation's][1].
> The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.
IANA-ATC, but presumably in an emergency, you're permitted to obtain clearance from ATC to enter an active runaway, to get to the emergency. (Which they did, and got, but which ATC later effectively revokes with the command to stop, prior to the accident. Whether ATC should have granted the clearance, well, I'll wait for the NTSB report there.)
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY
Air traffic (and ground traffic) control are not simple problems. La Guardia has 350k aircraft operations (takeoffs and landings) every year. 1000/day. Peak traffic is almost certainly more than 1 plane every minute. Runways are always in use and the idea that some simple software will solve all the safety problems is not grounded in reality.
This isn’t hypothetical, this system just exists in other countries. Digital systems can confirm flight instruction from ATC with zero radio communication.
> Digital systems can confirm flight instruction from ATC with zero radio communication.
Digital comms is available in the US:
* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/DataComm
The issue is that the final approach and landing (and taxiing?) environments are probably too dynamic for that: in this particular situation one of the vehicles was responding to an emergency (fire).
In addition to huge planes, there is baggage transportation, passenger buses (to mid-field terminals), fuel pumpers, emergency vehicles, snow plows, deicers, and general maintenance vehicles (clear debris off runways).
I’m not saying we couldn’t move more into automation. What I’m saying is that doing so will not solve all of our air/ground control problems. We still have human pilots and humans driving vehicles on the ground. Switching from humans directing landings to machines might improve some things but will not solve for all (and probably not most) risks.
Literally the crash here was caused by a fire truck entering the runway.
The ATC told them to enter the runway because they were confused or distracted due t overwork.
No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
People are saying automation could handle a significant portion of the routine things allowing humans to handle the more complex/finicky issues.
Even if automation could handle 10% of the most common situations it would be a huge boon. In reality its probably closer to 50%.
There's unfortunately an alertness problem WRT automated systems.
If the reason you have the human there is to handle the unusual cases, you run the real risk that they just aren't paying attention at critical moments when they need to pay attention.
It's pretty similar to the problem with L3 autonomous driving.
Probably the sweet spot is automation which makes clear the current set of instructions on the airport which also red flags when a dangerous scenario is created. I believe that already exists, but it's software that was last written in 1995 or so.
Regardless, before any sort of new automation could be deployed, we need slack for the ATC to be able to adopt a new system. That's the biggest pressing problem. We could create the perfect software for ATC, but if the current air traffic controllers are all working overtime and doing a job designed for 3 people rather than one, they simply won't have the time to explore and understand that new system. It'll get in the way rather than solve a problem. More money is part of the solution here, but we also need a revamped ATC training program which can help to fill the current hole.
> The ATC told them to enter the runway because they were confused or distracted due t overwork.
Very possibly. It will be interesting what comes from the investigation.
> No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
I’m asking if it would have solved even the current situation. The truck presumably saw the red light, and was asking to cross. Would traffic control have said no if more had been automated and if so, what automation would fix this? Unless we are supposing the truck would be autonomously driven and refuse to proceed when planes are landing, in which case, maybe, though that’s not really ATC automation anymore.
an automated system that could check if a plane is about to land on a runway and show some kind of alert or red light is hardly a stretch of the imagination
That’s such a great idea that it already exists and is deployed at La Guardia.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
Thank you for providing your aviation knowledge to this discussion. What a classic example of tech people thinking that because they're smart, every other industry must be dumb and they can just jump in and fix it.
I also do not like this persistent tone of “everyone else is stupid; software would easily fix it” that pops up so often. Not all problems are easy to fix with some code.
To be clear, though, I don’t even have significant aviation knowledge. But this isn’t hard to learn about. That’s part of what irks me so much about this tone. It’s not just “I’m so smart” it’s “I’m so confident that you’re dumb that I don’t need to know anything about the domain you’re working in to know better than you”. Someone could ask ChatGPT why airports don’t have stoplights to stop traffic from crossing the runway and it would reveal the existence of this system.
> "I don’t need to know anything about the domain you’re working in to know better than you"
This frustates me to no end. Is it just an example of the Dunning–Kruger effect?
Agreed, but I see this in every industry. And though it's certainly arrogant on some level, I think of it in a more positive light: people are generally optimistic and want to solve problems.
My grandfather had a rule at his business for 55-ish years: we welcome your ideas and suggestions, but not for the first year. You spend that time learning our processes, decisions behind them, pain points, areas that need improvement, etc. You also spend that time doing the work and hearing from your colleagues. Then you can (hopefully) make informed suggestions. That's not possible in every situation, but I like the intent.
The habit where HN commenters greenfield solutions that are slightly worse versions of the ones experts already have in place is unmatched.
In an ideal world this would be like rail traffic, where the runway would be 'locked' (red signal) due to the landing plane, and the fire engine would have to explicitly request an override to cross the locked runway, and importantly, this process has to be _rare_. If it's something that's done 5000 times a day, it'll be normalized. Everyone involved should be aware of the dangers of traversing a 'locked' runway.
My understanding that this scenario is exactly what happened here.
Changing the delivery method doesn't do anything to solve the problem of a controller sending an instruction that creates a hazard.
What is _really_ needed is a replacement of the archaic narrowband analog FM radio. Where you can't listen and talk at the same time. There are probably at least several dozen accidents where the inability to communicate with an aircraft or a road vehicle was a contributing factor.
I would settle for a good digital system with an ability to issue emergency/priority calls to specific receivers. Oh, and full-duplex communication.
I'm practicing for a sports pilot license, and I really have problems with understanding other pilots and the ATC.
> more than 1 plane every minute
Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.
I'm pretty sure the amount of data isn't the problem here. Maybe it's the number of corner cases? You would still want some human-in-the loop with quality UI for ATC.
There are plenty of stories of ATC helping to guide pilots back to the ground after an engine failure or after a student pilot had their instructor pass out on them or something like that.
Even if most of the work is routine, you definitely still want a human in the loop.
It's worth pointing out that plenty of pilots take off and land safely at uncontrolled airports. ATC is a throughput optimization; the finite amount of airspace can have more aircraft movements if the movements are centrally coordinated. It feels like we are nearing the breaking point of this optimization, however, and it's probably worth looking for something better (or saying no to scheduling more flights).
The FAA already does issue temporary ground stops for IFR flights when ATC capacity is saturated. This acts as a limit on airlines scheduling more flights, although the feedback loops are long and not always effective. The FAA NextGen system should improve this somewhat.
https://www.faa.gov/nextgen
True. But to avoid 1 minute unavailability per year requires 99.9999 % availability
Like any scale system, degrade the experience. Use radio if the more advanced systems are unavailable?
In a digitized environment. We cannot yet simulate the real world.
with extremely controlled conditions. There is no fog in database, nor fallible humans involved, What an ignorant response
Yup, by having backup runways.
A third runway for Heathrow was formally proposed in 2007 and is projected for completion in 2040. This is an airport so overburdened people are buying and trading slots.
This isn't a Kubernetes cluster where you can add VMs in 30 seconds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport
And no fire trucks crossing the runways.
....they need to get to fucking fire
....if they go around kilometer of the runway the fire will turn into bigger fire
Two trucks
Did it? They didn’t get there so did we get bigger fire at their target?
I imagine the training will consist of something like changing the comms protocol to say “runway lights are on, control. Truck 1 confirming cross runway 4D?” prior to crossing. Double check so to speak.
>> Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.
A naive view that confuses the map with the territory.
While in a database state you write a row and reality updates atomically....for aircraft they exist in a physical world where your model lives with lag, noise, and lossy sensors, and that world keeps moving whether your software is watching or not. Failed database transactions roll back, a landing clearance issued against stale state does not. The hard problem in ATC is not coordination logic but physical objects with momentum, human agency, and failure modes that do not respect your consistency model.
That makes digitization even more important, you sold me.
No one said it was simple. You're tilting at windmills.
Literally called it “low hanging fruit”.
But context is important. "Low-hanging fruit" doesn't mean the solution is "easy" in a vacuum, it just means this specific aspect is the easiest and/or most obvious place to start attacking a problem.
Or to stick with the language of the analogy, every fruit tree has some fruit that is lower than the others. That doesn't mean all "low-hanging fruit" is within arm's reach of the ground, some fruit just doesn't require as big of a ladder as other fruit.
This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case. I don't know enough about ATC to have any confidence in my opinion on the viability of replacing humans with software.
I disagree with you entirely. "Lowest-hanging fruit" isn't the same as "low-hanging fruit". The phrase "low-hanging fruit" does specifically mean that the solution is easy, in a vacuum - the fruits are "low", which is not relative to the other fruits or the height of the tree, but relative to the ground.
That goal post moved so fast it made a whooshing noise as it passed
I think you're mistaken. That whooshing sound must have been my comment flying over your head.
That was my first comment in this thread, so there was no established goal to change. My sole goal was to clarify the meaning of an idiom that the comment I was replying to was misstating.
I even included a disclaimer that "This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case", so I don't know how you could have received it as such.
Hehehehe, grounded.
> The runway should be essentially 'locked' when in use, if they don't want screens in every ground vehicle that may cross a runway, at least display it at runway entrances.
It does, the Runway Status Lights System uses radar to identify when the runway is in use and shows a solid bright red bar at every entrance to the runway. I'm curious what the NTSB has to say about it for this incident. From the charts LGA does have RWSLs. I didn't check NOTAM to see if they were out of service though.
> From the charts LGA does have RWSLs. I didn't check NOTAM to see if they were out of service though.
Just to add…
The vehicle in question got clearance from ATC to cross the runway. ATC revoked it shortly afterwards (by radioing "Tower, Truck 1. Stop truck 1. Stop! Stop Truck 1, STOP!" (followed by the incident; the next transmission is go-arounds.)); presumably, ATC realized the impending danger. I am assuming that requesting permission from ATC to enter a runway in an emergency is a permitted action, so RWSL aren't going to prevent this type of incident.
I don't think we know why Truck 1 did not heed the stop warning (e.g., if it came too later, got lost, etc.), but I am thinking that if they understood the indication from the RWSL, they overrode it by getting clearance, because they needed to cross the runway due to the (first) emergency.
So, same. Will be curious to see what NTSB says. I suspect something about resource management: there seems to be too much happening, too quickly, for that one ATC controller. While perhaps the controller makes mistakes, the mistakes appear to my untrained ear as "reasonable", and I'd like the system to be such that reasonable mistakes don't cost lives.
I’d love a source indicating it’s permissible to override the RWSL for emergency vehicles. In all training materials I’ve seen for pilots, it’s clear that an ATC clearance does NOT permit overriding the RWSL indication precisely for this scenario where ATC inadvertently provided a bad clearance. The direction to pilots is to query the controller to give them a chance for a second look and trap the error of the incorrect clearance. I linked the FAA page in another post where it provides direction to ground vehicles as well. Tomorrow I will have more time to research but this might be one of those things buried in a difficult to find Advisory Circular or something.
Emergency vehicles almost always can override/ignore warning devices (think firetrucks running red lights) which can cause "fun" for some value of "death/dismemberment/vehicle loss".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0Xf7aU5Udo
Airport emergency services are presumably trained in this, but since a plane cannot stop easily (or not at all on takeoff after V1), I seem to remember the general rule is that even emergency vehicles with lights and sirens on give way to planes, and don't enter runways without permission from the tower.
In the audio released by the BBC, the fire truck DID get permission from the tower to cross something, I can't tell if it was the runway in question. However, to cross the red runway lights if lit, you normally need that spelled out too something like "truck one, cross four delta, cross red lights". This did not happen on the BBC audio, which could mean one of many things.
They got clearance, which was overruled by a STOOOP!
The guy was alone operating 2 frequencies, had an emergency of another aircraft going on… is not so easy as many commenters from the armchair are insinuating
>The guy was alone operating 2 frequencies, had an emergency of another aircraft going on… is not so easy as many commenters from the armchair are insinuating
I'm not saying its easy, I'm actually specifically saying it's such a hard job we should have automated most of it away ages ago. If the only thing stopping an accident like this is an ATC employee, this _will_ happen in the future.
They came up with rail signals long before the idea of a computer even existed. It's hard to believe voice only communication of routes and runway access is the best path forward. Especially when passenger airliners are involved.
Automation emboldens policy makers to reduce human count because of the perceived increase in safety. This results in less eyes and brains monitoring for situations of automation failure or abnormalities. The corner stone of aviation safety over the last several decades has been having multiple, highly trained and experienced operators on station monitoring aviation systems to catch those moments when something goes wrong. Additionally, a culture where those operators are encouraged to speak up and be heard when something goes wrong without fear of being reprimanded is essential.
Automation is fantastic. We use it extensively in aviation. However, the long tail of 9s in reliable requires constant vigilance and oversight because anything that can go wrong will.
Who's entering the signal that the runway is locked? What if they screw up?
There are so many failure modes with vehicles and planes using the same tarmac that I fail to see how anything would be worth developing here that doesn't eliminate that requirement altogether.
Currently it’s automated at this airport: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
Presumably this is lack of familiarity with this on the part of firefighters.
Ah, okay. I suppose it'll be part of the investigation but I wonder if the RELs were indiciating an unsafe runway which prompted the firetruck to ask or if they always ask for permission. Either way, I think my assesment is still correct: there are a lot of edge cases that neither lights nor humans are going to stop. O'Hare apparently has tunnels/underpasses for ground vehicles to use which seems basically foolproof for avoiding collisions like this.
They got clearance and then obviously didn't bother to look outside, which is a dereliction of the basic responsibility of operating any vehicle on an airport surface. Clear left, clear right, then cross the hold short line.
(See my other comment below if you're tempted to say something about visibility.)
They could not see, because delta crosses in diagonal to the runway, such that the plane comes from behind (and the right side) so the driver has no chance to see. The truck was moving fast which is ok, because you want to clear the runway as fast as possible.
It doesn't matter what the orientation of the taxiway is. If you can't see when you're stopped straight on the taxiway centerline, you stop at an angle instead.
There is never an excuse for not visually clearing a runway before entering it.
From where I'm sitting, it's not really "the fault" of ATC (even though it is) simply because I'm not trusting enough of ATC even when they're on "my side".
When cleared across a runway I'm still going to be looking in all directions, and proceed as fast as I can. I also look both ways at railway crossings even if the guards are up and silent.
I wonder if visibility was good enough that looking both ways before crossing the runway would have prevented this.
That'll be one of the things the NTSB investigates.
I also wonder if you're down to a "one controller" scenario if it would be better for there to be once frequency, not a ground/air split.
Or perhaps a "one controller" scenario is just terrible policy.
No. it wasn't. Delta crosses 04 in diagonal, so basically they should have taken the head out of the window and look behind. They had the clearance, so they just tried to cross. The problem is for some reason they did not hear the "Truck 1 stop" call.
From the FAA’s site [1] on RWSL:
> If an Air Traffic Control clearance is in conflict with the Runway Entrance Lights, do not cross over the red lights. Contact Air Traffic Control and advise that you are stopped due to red lights. (ex.: "Orlando Ground, Ops 2 is holding short of runway 36 Left at Echo due to red lights").
Airports are highly controlled environments unlike typical motor vehicle roadways and generally the same rules apply for aircraft, vehicles, and equipment on airport surface movement areas. From all sources I can find, if the RWSLs were working they should have been red and nobody should have entered the runway without further clarification from ATC.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
All vehicles can override/ignore warning devices. Doesn't make it right. Emergency vehicles should not override/ignore train or plane crossings. Trains and Planes don't care about flashing lights. Crossing an active runway requires clearance for safety.
In this case, from the available information, the drivers of the fire truck thought they were cleared, and proceeded to cross while a plane was cleared to land. I'm not familiar with ATC ground radio to know if they were actually cleared or not, but it seems clear that that the drivers thought they were cleared.
Investigation reports will give us more details.
You can't just throw software at this. It's a complex system that involves way more than just an airplane and someone in a tower. Systems engineering, human factors, and safety management systems are the relevant disciplines if you'd like to start reading up. In addition there are decades of research on the dynamics between human operators and automation, and the answer is never as simple as "just add more automation." Increased reliance on automation can paradoxically decrease safety.
CPDLC is already being deployed domestically. It's currently available to all operators in en route segments.
All runway incursions at towered airports are reported, classified according to risk, and investigated.
On the flipside, look at the success of TCAS. It doesn't have a perfect operational history. It hasn't completely eliminated midairs, either. But it took a relatively rare event and further reduced the frequency by about a factor of 5.
I wouldn't be so quick to rule out that there's some kind of relatively easy technological double check that could greatly reduce incidents. The fact that we've not gotten there despite years of effort to reduce runway incursions doesn't mean that it's not possible.
TCAS is fantastic - absolutely stellar example of effective automation.
But calling a replacement of major ATC functions with software a "simple fix" is a perfect illustration of why this is a bad idea. Nothing about human-rated safety-critical software is simple, and coming at it with the attitude that it is? In my view, as an experienced pilot, flight instructor, spacecraft operator, and software engineer, that thinking is utterly disqualifying.
Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL, which didn't prevent this accident.
I don't know. At some point, you need to do all the systems engineering. But "why not just ......" is a perfectly reasonable place to start looking at a problem and sometimes the answers really are that simple.
> Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL
It'll be interesting to hear why RWSL didn't help, as it is supposedly deployed at LGA.
You could put a TCAS on every ground vehicle. It's not rocket science.
Yes, I know it probably costs $300k, surely today you can have a $10k ground version.
You could also show every plane on a screen inside the vehicle and have some loud alarms if they are on a collision path.
You could even just display FlightRadar24, still better than nothing.
You would still get permission for the tower, this would not be an allow system, just a deny system.
> You could put a TCAS on every ground vehicle. It's not rocket science.
TCAS on planes is disabled below 1000±100' (~300m) AGL (above ground level).
ADS-B on vehicles is already a thing (and FAA certified):
* https://uavionix.com/airports-and-atm/vtu-20/
There are three categories of runway incursion types: operator/ATC error, pilot error, pedestrian/vehicle. Even if someone 'knows' that they need to "hold short runway 12", they can still have a brain fart and go through the hold short line.
Unless you want to argue that all vehicles taxiing have to operate (SAE Level 4) autonomously?
Yeah but TCAS works inside each airplane. ATC (and ground operations) require coordinating across multiple types of aircraft, at airports across the world, with high precision AND humans in the loop (there are A LOT of edge cases).
This is a REALLY hard problem that the US cannot solve alone. It would require extensive global coordination.
Not insurmountable, but this is not something you can easily roll out piecemeal. If even a single aircraft lacks the compatible equipment you're back to the existing system.
> You can't just throw software at this
Ok, let's not try improving systems, how's that working out?
"each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed"
I feel the same way about close calls on the road, especially ones involving a vehicle and a vulnerable road user like a pedestrian or cyclist. Way too many lives being saved by a person jumping out of the way at the last minute who shouldn't have had to do so, and then cops and bureaucrats shrugging with "well what do you want us to do, the numbers don't show enough fatalities here for it to be worth fixing" and later when someone actually does die it becomes "this is a horrible tragedy that no one could have seen coming, let's focus on thoughts and prayers rather than accountability that could lead to structural change."
If it was all on video I'm all for it, though the argument "I wasn't driving" makes it more trouble than it's worth.
As a former bike commuter who used to send helmet cam vids to my local police, I definitely got back that response a bunch of times, "we have the plate but not the face of the driver, so it's not actionable for us, even to issue a warning".
Which has always seemed a little nuts, like in case of hit and run it would definitely be possible to take action based on a plate alone, both for police and insurance purposes. Unless the registered owner can point to the not-them person who was driving their car at that time, then it was them. Or it was stolen, but either way there will be a clear paper trail.
>Which has always seemed a little nuts, like in case of hit and run it would definitely be possible to take action based on a plate alone, both for police and insurance purposes. Unless the registered owner can point to the not-them person who was driving their car at that time, then it was them. Or it was stolen, but either way there will be a clear paper trail.
All that creates a mountain of work and man hours that any police department in America would likely put on low priority.
Basically our legal system is too forgiving and the possibility that someone stole their car (even if it was a friend) and returned it 20 minutes later exists, and therefore it's on the police to prove it wasn't.
And the law is pretty hard to change since it would change it to 'guilty until proven innocent'.
How would you exactly "digitize"? While that sounds like a nice idea in theory it's the same as "digitizing" road traffic.
In the end the air traffic system is a highly complex but also a highly reliable system, especially when you compare accident rates.
I am sure the working conditions of ATC staff might be improved - but being both a pilot and a programmer, I know that there is no easy digitalization magic wand for aviation.
The Runway Status Light system already does this via automated monitoring of traffic from multiple systems: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
I'm sure the NTSB report will cover why this didn't stop the accident. Presumably either the system wasn't working as-expected, or the fire truck proceeded despite the warning lights since they had clearance from the controller.
The system is only advisory at present, so if the truck did see a warning light and proceeded anyway, they were technically permitted to do so.
>In the end the air traffic system is a highly complex but also a highly reliable system, especially when you compare accident rates.
1700 incursions a year, and other articles mentioning multiple near misses a week at a single airport [1]. It is safe in practice, likely largely due to the pilots here also being heavily trained and looking for mistakes, but it seems a lot like rolling the dice for a bad day.
>I am sure the working conditions of ATC staff might be improved - but being both a pilot and a programmer, I know that there is no easy digitalization magic wand for aviation.
I didn't say it'd be free. Just hard to believe radio voice communication is the best way to go.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airl...
> While that sounds like a nice idea in theory it's the same as "digitizing" road traffic.
Traffic lights instead of mad max intersections are better.
Then there's subway Automatic Train Control.
I don't know that Air Traffic Control staff don't have computer systems for establishing which plane owns what airspace. They at least did do it manually already following specific processes, so it can be at least augmented and a computer can check for conflicts automatically (if it isn't already). And, sure, ATC could still use radio, but there could be a digital standard for ensuring everybody has access to all local airspace data. Or maybe that wouldn't help.
Your ground vehicle wanting to cross a runway could have the driver punch "cross runway 5" button (cross-referenced with GPS) and try to grab an immediate 30 second mutex on it. The computer can check that the runway is not allocated in that time (i.e. it could be allocated 2 minutes in the future, and that would be fine).
But, as pointed out elsewhere, obviously some of this is already present: stop lights are supposed to be present at this intersection.
The problem is knowing before today how to handle the case where a ground vehicle isn't across the runway in those 30 seconds.
It's already digitized, he's clueless. The ATC knows where vehicle was and where the plane is going, it looks as simple case of mistake or maybe not watertight enough procedures
I'm sure they've started all of this a few times over the past decade. The problem is in the US if you can't start and finish a project like that in less than 2 years then it's effectively dead in the water. The last time we "modernized" ATC was closer to the 90's than today, when there was still some general political will to make our government agencies modern instead of tearing them to pieces.
The FAA NextGen program has been running for literally decades. They have made some progress but there's a lot of work left to be done.
https://www.faa.gov/nextgen
Automating ATC is similar to automating flying in general. Even if it's possible to automate 99% of 99% of flights, including even takeoff and landing, commercial flights still have two pilots because if things start to go wrong there's just so many edge cases that you can't easily write automation to handle all of them. Same thing for ATC, except even worse. They still have control towers because controller eyeballs still work even if nothing else does, if ground radar fails, or if a vehicle doesn't have an ADS-B transponder, or if a crash eliminates the radios, etc. There's just so many edge cases that making automation be able to handle everything is extremely difficult
But still, even if you need humans when things go wrong, automating away all the work for when things go right is a massive load off those people. There will always be failures, the goal is fewer failures, and especially eliminating known failure modes.
Ha. My first job in '89 was working for an FFRDC reviewing IBM's Jovial code that was going to "revolutionize ATC" by modernizing everything.
I'm gonna guess that code never went into production. The problem seems easy until you start looking under the hood.
This isn’t really ATC though connected. I was just watching a presentation from Royal Schiphol today about a lot of the automation of the airport they’re putting in place as part of admittedly long-term 2050 plans. Lots of computer infrastructure rework.
The BBB allocated $12B for ATC modernization. https://www.faa.gov/new-atcs
Money isn't the only reason it's so old. The coordination problems are huge. https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/24/us_air_traffic_contro...
There are systems for it, just not really integrated into emergencies and ground vehicles. Mistakes also happen even if all info required to avoid is present
What you are describing is sometimes considered to be part of the mythical Cat IIIC standard. The gap between Cat IIIB and Cat IIIC is being able to fully automate the entire taxiing and other ground manoeuvring. It is widely considered to be impossible to achieve safely with current tech. It does feel like the future though.
> That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point.
There is digital comms with ATC without voice:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller–pilot_data_link_com...
* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/DataComm
But in the highly dynamic environment of final approach, landing, and taxiing, I doubt it would be practical. Unless we want to try autonomous 'driving' on taxiways and runways?
I'm a ground instructor and instrument rated pilot and I fly a 206 in and out of busy charlie and delta airports. I'm also a ham radio guy (WT1J) and an SDR dev. I'm 100% with you on this, but the amount of inertia you're dealing with here approaches infinity. And there are some weirdly strong arguments for not changing things.
We use AM simplex radio. That means everyone hears everyone else and that helps everyone build a situational awareness picture. Secondly we use AM because if someone transmits over someone else it makes a squealing noise so you know it happened. Also AM propagates pretty well.
Most people on HN could design a pretty good digital replacement in a few minutes - and no doubt some have been suggested in these comments. But its instructive to understand a bit about aviation history. The liability risk carried by aircraft and avionics manufacturers at one point go so bad that we stopped making general aviation planes in the USA. Then that liability was limited to a very small extent by GARA, and we had what we call the 'restart' of manufacturing.
So the idea of introducing a new mandatory replacement (not addition like ADS-B) for AM comms has a lot of resistance from quite a few areas: Manufacturers don't want to have to make the capex to reinvent and recertify new equipment. The US has a lot of old planes due to the lack of innovation because of the liability issue - and so those old planes all need a retrofit and pilots don't want to spend that money. Avionics for certified aircraft is already horrifically expensive. Legislators don't want to take on the risk of an incident attached to a bill they sponsored. And then there's the practical matter of now having two systems - the legacy AM comms, and the modern one that some have and some don't and the split in situational awareness between those populations.
So while full-duplex is seductive, and digital is seductive, and satellite seems like the obvious endgame - the reality of transitioning is very difficult.
Vehicles are listening to the same audio the pilots are, so they have the same mental picture of what's going on. Last week I talked to a maintenance vehicle at KBLI directly from the air because he was on a runway I needed to land on, at an untowered field. He cleared it, I landed, and he went about his business. So the system works pretty well most of the time.
I think the root of the issue here is actually something else. Firstly there is a lot of dissatisfaction among NATCA members (ATC union) towards their union, and the view seems to be that the union could be doing a lot better job of lobbying for their workers. You can visit /r/atc or /r/atc2 on reddit to learn more.
Secondly, the USA has fallen into a nasty trap where our government has positive incentives to choreograph shutdowns to get our congress members and senate members the face time that they crave. So there is a negative incentive to resolve a shutdown. Rather let it get hot, let it play out, and maybe you'll be the one to appear to save the day to your constituents. The trouble with this is that the department that creates one of the highest risks for civilians in a very visible way, is the FAA and the controllers in particular. So they have become a political football. And they're in an extremely stressful job without pay. And that's a very big problem.
You're seeing this play out in a growing adversarial relationship between the NTSB (e.g. DCA) and FAA, with NTSB tearing FAA a new one recently for DCA - and rightly so. I think that's led to more demotivation at FAA which hasn't helped.
So the situation is spiraling out of control. We have controllers who are overworked, who regularly don't get paid, and a union not doing the greatest job at advocating for them. Along with the recent cuts in government funding across the board.
It's frustrating for pilots. The best we've been able to do is bring our local TRACON folks stacks of free pizza, both in Colorado and Seattle. But that's obviously a token gesture. I don't see a way out of it. To be perfectly honest. And it's very frustrating because the amount of good work that FAA does, is quite startling. You'd be amazed how much data they produce including real-time feeds that are freely available to devs like us. Once you get into the IFR world and start looking not just at approach plates, but the review and updating process of each, the other maps that are produced, the real-time sitrep data that they're producing - it's really quite something what they've accomplished. And the world looks to FAA for its lead in aviation. We were the first to pioneer powered fixed wing flight, after all. I can only hope there's a way out of this.
> There's 1700+ runway incursions a year in the US alone, each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed. Like when an accident occurs.
How many runways crossings are there in a year? How much is "1700+" a percentage of that total?
A "runway incursion" is a very broad term that includes everything from this accident to a single engine Cessna moving past the hold short line prematurely at a quiet airport.
FAA defines it as "Any occurrence at an aerodrome involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on the protected area of a surface designated for the landing and take off of aircraft." [0]
Many runway incursions run no risk of any accident, but are still flagged as issues, investigated, and punished if appropriate.
[0] https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/resources/runway_...
The point is that it doesn't matter what percentage of the total they are, it's that 1 is too high without adequate explanation (the Gimli Glider caused vehicles to be guilty of a runway incursion by turning an abandoned runway into an active one, for example).
And the cost of investigating 1,700 should be within the budget.
Of course it matters. All of these entities have limited budgets and personnel and almost unlimited ways they could apply those resources. They have to choose what to chase and they do that by deciding how big of a problem it is.
If 1,700 is a huge percentage of runway uses (obviously it isn't but grant it, say at a single airport), then it's mandatory it be investigated because it's so huge.
If 1,700 is a minuscule fraction of all runway uses (as it likely is) then investigating it should be a proportionally minuscule amount of the budget.
There are five categories of incursion, with the top one being where a collision occurs:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runway_incursion#Definition
* https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/resources/runway_...
All incursions (in the US) are tracked:
* https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/statistics
Given there are ~45,000 flights per days in the US (and so aircraft and vehicles would move hither and fro around an airport for each flight), 1700 feels like a small number.
Exactly - it's a small number and should be investigated, because if we reduce the number of all incursions, we reduce the number of collisions (and fatalities).
They are classified as operation/ATC error, pilot error, and vehicle/pedestrian error.
Human can misspeak or mishear instructions, but if they were communicated and understood correctly (a read back was correct), but the pilot had a 'brain fart' and went forward instead of stopping, how do we eliminate brain farts?
That's a big part of the story of aviation; the way things are communicated has changed because of brain farts, the way things are lined up, etc.
See 5-2-5 for an example:
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html...
NOTE- Previous reviews of air traffic events, involving LUAW instructions, revealed that a significant number of pilots read back LUAW instructions correctly and departed without a takeoff clearance. LUAW instructions are not to be confused with a departure clearance; the outcome could be catastrophic, especially during intersecting runway operations.
The older term was "hold short runway X" and that was too close to "hold runway X" - the first meant do NOT enter the runway, the second meant enter and line up but do NOT takeoff.
The old version of “line up and wait” was “taxi into position and hold”. “Hold short of runway” is still in use but means something different.
You can't know how big of a problem it is without an investigation. Frequently, the initial "obvious" cause of a collision or incursion turns out to be a multi-layered set of failures. Tightening up procedures or recognizing a previously overlooked defect in the systems makes us all safer and should be prioritized.
We talk about Vision Zero for streets. Vision Zero is actually achievable in aviation.
My very fuzzy back of the envelope says easily 10s of thousands per day.
There is a certain class of person who will take something simple like, say, brake lights on a car, and extrapolate it out to industrial control systems of something incredibly complex with demanding safety requirements and "observe" "it can't be that hard can it?"
I remember a debate a year or two ago about a plane ignoring instructions (IIRC it had changed frequencies) and had taxiied onto a runway when a plane was landing. Luckily the landing plane saw this and do a go around so nobody was harmed.
In the aftermath, there were similar complaints to yours. "Why can't they just have lights to block planes when a departing or landing plane was using the runway?" without thinking through how any of that works. For a start:
- How do you allocate that a runway is "in use"?
- If ATC does it, what if they fail to turn the system on?
- What if turning it on or off fails?
- What if it gets stuck on or off? How do you fix it? Are there procedures for ATC to override it anyway?
- There are multiple entry points to a runway. What if they're in different states?
- What company si going to sell such a system and accept liability?
- What training requirements will be needed for ATC and the pilots?
- What do you do if a pilot goes ahead and ignores it?
I think people can't think beyond cars. Cars have had unimaginable effort put into them so they can only operate within a certain window. Even then they require maintenance.
But as soon as you scale up to industrial safety and control systems, a power plant, the engine on a ship, etc you will end up with a bunch of controls where the people using them need to be skilled operators and it is essentially impossible to eliminate mistakes with automation and IT systems. You will need overrides. You will need redundancies. You will need to end up doing things nobody has ever considered before and have to rely upon training, education and experience to go beyond the envelope. That's just how it works.
The Rocket-man-bad-person tried to do this last year and essentially lost his company over this.
> That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point
How would you do it, then?
You seem to be giving too much credit to the singleton design pattern. We know exactly how well that works on a modern, multi-tasking, preemptible operating system (hint: not well at all).
> That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point.
Voice communication is insane? I suspect you are ignorant of what it is like to actually fly a large aircraft into a busy airport. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment.
There is some interesting research that captures this sentiment and shows how complex a solution might need to be (replace "faulty agent" with "human error"): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00051...
Voice communication has the advantage is that it can be used without taking off hands and attention off controls. Digital solution would require using device.
Voice communication can still be used for anything out of the ordinary despite automating the common case.
Almost all voice transmissions are routine instructions/clearances from ground to air, with the pilots reading them back to reduce the chance of errors. In fact, this already exists and is in wide use in (at least) the US, EU, and in transoceanic airspace.
Of course, now you have two systems that can fail, and reducing reliance on the older one can easily cause automation complacency (which is a well-researched source of errors) and require more frequent refresher courses if the skill is not practiced on a continuos basis.
I suspect that that these are the reasons it's not commonly used for approach and tower operations: There's a lot more spontaneous and/or nonstandard stuff happening in those flight phases, and as you say you don't want a pilot's eyes on a tiny screen/keyboard instead of on their instruments or out the window.
Listening to some recent close call ATC tapes, yes, it seems absolutely insane to manage current traffic levels with the existing number of controllers over voice.
I don't doubt that it's a very safe system with enough slack allowing for intentional redundancy. But as it is, some of these controllers seem to be limited by their ability to pronounce instructions, leaving absolutely no margin for error and presumably very little room for conscious thought.
HN has recently banned AI written / edited comments. Be better.
I would not trust my life to a government software project (See Phoenix Payroll for a typical case)
ATC recording on https://www.liveatc.net/recordings.php Fire truck was cleared to cross and then told to stop. I'm not sure if they were the only controller working at the time, they continued working after the incident which seems unusual; my understanding is normally they'd be relieved by another controller.
They were indeed the only controller, working both ground and tower frequencies.
Which, as a non informed person but someone who needs to travel by plane, sounds absolutely insane. Was it always possible to staff that with a single person or is that a result of understaffing?
As an informed person (PPL flying single engine into smallish towered airports all the time), it is absolutely insane for an airport the size of LGA. Occasionally, you will encounter one guy doing tower and ground at very small class D airports or during not-so-busy shifts.
To play devil's advocate, ASEL into small deltas is significantly different than receiving full-stop IFRs late at night.
This small mistake (and it is initially small, just catastrophic) is a system breakdown, not necessarily a staffing breakdown. Though staffing is definitely a wider issue in the NAS.
Edit to add: looking at this incident closer it appears LGA was busy enough to make a single tower/ground controller an obviously bad plan. Still, systemically, there's enough low hanging fruit here, like ADSb in for the airport trucks or hold short line guard lights. I hope the takeaway isn't just "don't have controllers make mistakes".
Yea, if you listen to the ATC audio, you can hear that in addition to the normal high workload of handling both ground and tower, this guy had an emergency aircraft on a taxiway to deal with, too. A lot of holes in the swiss cheese lined up, but one of them clearly is ATC workload.
Understaffing is no excuse at an airport that size with that kind of airspace. Somebody high up in the food chain with integrity and authority should be closing the runway if staffing is so low that it becomes unsafe. And I'm no expert, but having enough staff for separate air and ground control seems like a minimum safety requirement unless it's a tiny airport.
Pilot Unions should go on strike until ATC is properly staffed at every level, since Regan made it illegal for ATC themselves to go on strike.
I fly out of a small-to-medium-sized airport in Canada and I've never seen it happen there. The idea of one person being responsible for both tower and ground in the busiest airspace in the US is absolute insanity.
YVR has had flow control every day for years now, and closes the class C to VFR traffic on virtually any sunny day now, due to staffing problems. It's been happening since long before COVID, but that made it much worse. The controllers simply refuse to take on more traffic than they can safely handle.
Lots of pilots here have been complaining for years about how the US controllers are so much better, they can handle much more traffic, etc.
Agreed, but isn't O'Hare the busiest airport in the US?
Edit:- It's Atlanta.
Busiest airspace and busiest airport are two different things, technically.
The airspace that combines JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark, is the busiest airspace in the US.
It's a crazy airspace. Add to that Teterboro, 12 miles from NYC and Republic ~20 miles from NYC, along with all the heliports on the Hudson.
I don't envy anyone having to work in that airspace in any capacity.
Speaking very generally, it's not unusual at all. Tower and ground are combined all the time - at smaller airports.
Should they be combined at LGA when both (crossing) runways are in use, and there's an incident on the field? (The fire trucks were on their way to investigate a smell on the flight deck of another airplane that had to abort takeoff twice.)
I'd say hell no.
That seems unusual to me. It’s common at smaller airports, but for a big one like LaGuardia I’d think tower and ground would be two different controllers, even lateish at night like this was. I know there has been a staffing problem for controllers in the NY area for some time.
It's not unusual for airports to reduce staff at night, and the incident occurred at 23:36 local time. Even at a very large airport in a very busy traffic area, one controller can probably handle normal operations at this hour.
The obvious problem is what happens when operations become abnormal. ATC shouldn't be staffed for normal operations, because then abnormal operations lead to catastrophe. Welcome to last night: the weather is bad, which causes a plane to abort two takeoffs, which causes that plane to need emergency services. This increases the controller's workload beyond his capacity, so he accidentally clears the emergency vehicle to cross in front of a landing airplane, and they can't see the airplane because the weather is bad, so they follow the instruction and promptly get hit with an airplane.
When some bad weather can be the difference between "this is fine, one controller can handle it" and two dead pilots, you need to be staffed for bad weather.
Reddit aviation groups are full of professional pilots, saying how terrified they of flying into La Guardia or JFK, recounting close calls, with one saying how he avoided those two for 10 years...
It IS insane. Specially for LGA
It's absolutely understaffing.
But think of the money they saved by not having to pay another air traffic controller! A controller's yearly salary is the cost of about 10 seconds of the Iran war, based on the recently-reported figure of $11.3B for six days.
I don't think it's money. I think it's requirements and training pipeline restraints. The system is predicated on being able to throw bodies at the problem, but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up. Personally, I didn't realize ATC as a possible career path until I was 36-- imagine my surprise when I found that I had already aged out.
The training is also not run particularly well. There's a single facility in Oklahoma that every prospective air traffic controller has to go through. I had a friend in college who graduated in the early 2010s with a four year degree in air traffic control. He waited several years for the FAA to tell him he could start training, a spot never opened up, and he moved on with his life and did something different. It's broken on a pretty fundamental level if we have a shortage of air traffic controllers but also people who want to do it can't get in.
> but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up
Which means either the compensation is insufficient to attract and retain the necessary number of qualified individuals, or the FAA lacks the resources to train an appropriate number of qualified individuals. Either way, it's about money.
Who would want to work that job once they find out what the day-to-day is like? I had an intern who looked at that out of the Air Force but he found out what you get paid and what the expectations are for the job and he figured he'd try his luck on something easier and better-paying like life-preserving medical devices. On a related note, why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?
I know this is a throwaway comment, but I can't let it pass.
> why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?
We're currently doing school visits for our kid, in a low-performing school district, and the teachers and administrators we've met have been impressive. I've worked in education, and visited a lot of schools in another professional capacity, so I know the questions to ask, and things to look for. I have no illusions about there being absolutely terrible teachers out there (and I'll tell you some horror stories, if you'd like), and doubtless any (hypothetical) bad teachers at those schools are being kept away from prospective parents, but your statement is hyperbolic in the extreme. The problems in the US school system are legion, but "every single teacher is crap" is not remotely true.
It’s not a money thing. It’s a shortage of people who are mentally able to do the job mixed with terrible hours and early forced retirements. ATC school has a failure rate of over 50 percent.
It's partially a money thing. ATC is under-compensated. They'd get more - and more talented - people interested if the money made up for the stress, hours, and early forced retirement.
Or increased their hiring funnel. Air traffic controller applicants must be under 31 years old for initial hire, which rules out a lot of potential hires.
Why not both? If it paid better then more people would apply to ATC school.
ATC positions already have a very low chance of even getting a spot in ATC school. There are tons of applicants for every opening.
Only one ATC isn't the issue here.
The emergency vehicle was told to stop and did not. Even a dozen ATC wouldn't have helped in that case.
There is no "the" issue in airline accidents. There are always multiple factors, and all of them had to happen in order for the accident to occur.
Understaffing is absolutely a factor. Had tower and ground not been combined, the erroneous clearance probably wouldn't have been issued.
The ARFF truck not complying with the stop instruction is absolutely a factor. Had they heard and complied, the accident wouldn't have happened.
And there are likely additional factors that will come out in the investigation.
I recommend reading some final aviation accident reports from the NTSB to learn more about how these investigations proceed and what kinds of conclusions and recommendations they include.
I read that the emergency vehicle may have weighed 60,000 lbs. It can't stop quickly any more than an airplane can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Kqg6sokz4
Watch the video.
Other trucks slow down, but truck 1 does not even try to slow down. I'd also argue that driving so quickly that you cannot maintain control is its own problem. Getting to an emergency 20 seconds later almost never matters as much as arriving safely.
> I'm not sure if they were the only controller working at the time, they continued working after the incident which seems unusual; my understanding is normally they'd be relieved by another controller
I remember late last year, couple of months ago, US ATC controllers were without pay but forced to work anyways (similar to TSA I suppose, although I don't think they were forced, but volunteered to work without salary), is that still the situation? Couldn't find any updates about that the situation been resolved, nor any updates that it's ongoing, if so though it feels like it'd be related to the amount of available controllers.
The US has had trouble keeping enough controllers. It's a skilled but extremely stressful job, and so retention would always be difficult but the US also works hard to make it suck more than it should, and of course the over-work from not having enough people makes that even worse.
But no, AIUI only things that were somehow deemed part of "Homeland Security" are frozen, the TSA are part of Homeland Security but the ATC are under the FAA. So this particular partial government funding lapse wasn't causal, at least directly.
Specifically, Reagan made a point to cut our nose to spite our face just to not pay ATC workers more money. For political and Ideological reasons.
So why the fuck would any talented individual choose to go work for the "Get an example made out of you" department, on top of the horrific stress of the actual job!?
The idea of a union that "isn't allowed" to strike is a joke. Next will be a union that has a max membership of 1!
ATCs weren't exactly forced to work: they aren't slaves and are free to quit any time. But if they didn't show up for assigned shifts even though they weren't getting paid then they were subject to disciplinary action including termination. Some of them called in sick, or took on temporary second jobs to bring in some cash (obviously a bad thing from a fatigue management standpoint). After the government shutdown they were paid in arrears for all of the hours they worked. It's crazy that Congress plays political games with essential services like ATC.
You're saying they'd have to work without pay lest they loose their livelihoods? That's like one bit away from slavery.
Unemployment equals slavery belittles slavery.
The budget was signed Feb 3 this year to fund most of the govt (excepting DHS) through September 2026. ATC were not paid from Sept 30, 2025 until Feb 4, 2026. They receive back pay. They are also supposed to get a raise and funds set aside to hire 2500 more ATC but that is currently held up in the DHS funding fight.
It's a mess.
Utterly unqualified to suggest any causes (wait for the NTSB report on that), but couple compounding factors I've read elsewhere to begin to understand the situation and context:
- Another plane was out of position, grabbing some attention of the controller
- Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
- The colliding plane didn't have "explicit" landing clearance, but a "follow previous plane and land the same way unless told otherwise" implicit landing clearance. In Europe, planes need an explicit landing clearance, the act of granting it may have brought attention to the runway contention. US implicit system (arguably) is a bit more efficient, debate will now be is it worth it (pilots are now required to read back instructions because of past blood... will this result in same thing?)
- This was around midnight and apparently a little foggy, making visual contacts harder
Remember folks, disasters like this are rarely caused by a single factor. NTSB reports are excellent post-mortems that look at all contributing factors and analyze how they compounded into failure. Be human here.
In the USA at controlled airports, aircraft also need explicit landing clearance.
"Jazz 646, number 2, cleared to land 4."
https://youtu.be/Pbm-QJAAzNY?si=h3VEuVNLMf9Z8D1c&t=126
They did have a very explicit clearance.
The controller said “truck 1 stop” that is not ambiguous.
> Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
"stop stop stop, truck 1 stop stop stop" I mean maybe it was ambiguous for half a second but he pretty quickly said "truck 1 stop". I guess we'll have to wait for the sync up to see if it was too late to stop by then
I’m always staggered by how stressed and tbh (not necessarily their fault given the circumstances) unprofessional US ATCs sound.
Sharp contrast with Europeans
In Europe is illegal to capture and publish ATC. I don't understand why. Anyway I do not know what are you comparing.
From pilot friends, in best case I would say a big “depends” in some countries are very unprofessional, in others very professional (anyway total unfair generalization). There were already accidents because of that, for example because the twr communicated with locals in non english, so not everybody was at the same page.
Video of the collision - https://x.com/airmainengineer/status/2036116651167384018
Damn that's awful.
I read elsewhere that the plane was only going 24mph when it hit the truck, and I didn't understand how the collision could have been that damaging, but I wasn't taking into account how much momentum a plane would have at that speed. From the video, it seems like a plane moving on the ground acts less like a car or truck and more like a very delicate freight train when it hits something.
Maybe they were talking about the truck going 24mph, but the plane is clearly going WAY faster than that.
I'm not completely sure but it seems like the runway entry lights are red which very clearly indicates the runway is in use. They should have known better.
It's crossing more than its entire length per second, so 36m - 130km/h+ or 80mph+.
This is the article I saw, but I agree it seems like its going much faster in the video https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/23/air-canada-crash-at...
This article claims 104 mph, not 24 mph: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/us/timeline-air-canada-collis...
Another link, video is slightly different (but collision is the same) - user is trying to select a region of the video I think
https://www.instagram.com/p/DWO75cTju2e/
There is video of the collision now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyTsnsWHoxc
Captain Steve breakdown: https://youtu.be/Hx-GFeErXD8?si=iND_BkDrtGNapB7Q His videos are pretty insightful and always respectful. Highly recommended. Expect him to have new videos as more information becomes available.
Can we please not promote captain Steve? He is regarded as a pompous ambulance chaser in aviation video circles. Blancolerio is a much better resource. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnSGMPaJ2OM
I like his videos, I'm not in 'aviation circles' and I find his videos both educational and I like his demeanor. Do appreciate the link to Blancolerio, I hadn't heard of him (I'm not super into aviation videos). De gustibus et coloribus :)
Emergency vehicles were en route to another emergency in progress on the other runway. Sadly it sounds like a fire truck was cleared to cross the active runway moments before the CRJ landed. By the time the controller realized that mistake it was too late.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Kqg6sokz4
The truck asks permission to cross. It is given. The truck declares it is going to cross, but the ATC replies "just stop there please".
Also, those runway entry lights look red to me. If so, that should have been a HUGE warning sign to the driver.
It was the “truck and company” that was cleared to cross. That’s probably 5+ vehicles you can see following the lead truck that were all approved. All while the jet was on short final. That controller lost situational awareness due to task saturation as a result of emergency aircraft on taxiway parallel to runway 13.
He said "Frontier 4195 stop there please". Then "stop stop stop stop truckon" By the time he clearly tells "truck 1" to stop, they're already entering the runway. Sounds like a bit of confusion.
I'm very, very curious about whether the ARFF crew visually cleared the runway and final before crossing the hold short line. It's standard procedure for flight crew to do this, specifically to mitigate the risk of ATC errors.
Reports are there were fog and rain at La Guardia at the time of the incident. They were on a short final, and it’s entirely possible they were not visible to the fire truck’s crew.
I have over 1,000 hours as PIC in the NY area alone, in all seasons and all weather, and I was in the region last night, awake when the accident happened. LGA was reporting 4SM -RA BR FEW045 BKN090 OVC110 at the time of the accident. The weather wasn't anywhere close to what I'd call "bad" here. Sprinkles and some high clouds.
I can almost guarantee you the airplane was visible from taxiway D.
You can also see from the videos that they could have easily seen the plane.
I want to agree, and it almost certainly seems like the case but visibility can be vary widely by position. So just because the camera was about as far away from the collision as the plane would have been when the truck was entering the runway, it doesn't mean the plane was visible to the firetruck.
At night with multiple runways it can be very hard to see a plane on final.
Still, I'm always hesitant to cross an active runway.
Yes ARFF should still look before crossing, but the weather wasn’t great with limited visibility and thus even if they looked it’s possible they didn’t see anything.
I mean, isn't it obvious that they didn't?
It’s obvious that either they didn’t, or they did but they didn’t see the plane. We don’t know which.
Do we know what the other emergency was? All the reporting I've seen has been very vague on this.
United aircraft did a high speed abort (80+ knots) and afterwards, fumes from hot brakes were entering the back of the cabin. (Not uncommon.)
Source: Mentour Pilot. https://www.youtube.com/live/Bb4CcoK0KLM
Unrelated United aborted takeoff, as well as reported some odors in the cabin from the flight attendants.
Odors from the flight attendants? If they were paid better they could shower more frequently.
Was curious if ground vehicles at airports also use transponders to communicate position to the radio tower, and it turns out the FAA put out a report last year on potential solutions to avoid this exact situation:
https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/certalerts/part_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8Kqg6sokz4
Truck declared it was crossing. ATC told it to stop. Truck didn't stop.
This wasn't a communication issue.
He asked Frontier 4195 to stop. By the time he asked truck 1 to stop they were entering the runway.
Many airports have ADS-B transponders in their ground vehicles. You can see them on flightradar or adsbexchange.
> Was curious if ground vehicles at airports also use transponders to communicate position […]
They do at CYYZ (Toronto Pearson):
* https://www.flightradar24.com/43.68,-79.63/13 (zoomed in)
* https://www.flightradar24.com/airport/yyz
Also at CYUL (Montreal Trudeau) and CYVR (Vancouver International).
Ground vehicles with transponders: https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=Planes&zoom=7&lat=42.1262&lng=...
Or just do like the rest of the world. No anticipated clearences to land, you only ever get a clerance when the runway is empty and yours.
I think this is a good idea.
The only negative I can think of is that it will generally involve accepting and responding to clearances on short final. I think adding more tasks to that critical stage of flight probably increases danger a little. Especially for low time student pilots like myself. That's particularly relevant in the U.S. because we have a higher percentage of student and private pilots than most of the world.
Overall, though, I'm fully convinced this would be safer.
Even without anticipated clearance to land you have to define what "the runway is empty and yours" means.
Yeah that gut wrenched ATC had to stay on point and ensure the next plane to land did a go around. Scary stuff.
Us lot have more people doing SRE ensuring p99 10ms for something frankly way less important. It is a nuts world.
LaGuardia has that system, it still failed to prevent this
Transponder doesn't alter the laws of physics for the landing plane you just cut off. I guess it gives ATC a ~5sec jump on telling some other flight to go around.
I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
> I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
I highly doubt that any system would intentionally give ground vehicles of any kind special treatment on an active runway.
The trajectory of the plane is obvious enough that it should be able to predict where it will likely be in 30 seconds or a minute. You can't cheat physics, if it is going down in direction of runway, it is landing or at worst will do go-around, so the services should be alterted runway is no-go automatically
It was night time so idk how obvious it would be that a plane is approaching when you're in a firetruck and probably have a million others things going on that all necessitate your attention as well.
Interesting historical overview: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/03/aviation-fai.... (Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47494469.)
https://www.avherald.com/h?article=536bb98e
> Captain and first officer are reported to have died in the accident, two fire fighters on board of the truck received serious injuries, 13 passengers received injuries.
https://x.com/thenewarea51/status/2035926457394876837
ATC audio
make a mistake, recognize it, and then have to continue on your job, knowing you likely just killed people, because if you don't others will die.
The weight of some jobs is immense, and our civilization relies upon workers to shoulder the burden everyday.
He asked the truck to stop multiple times. That's got to be so stressful and annoying - knowing you asked the truck to stop, but for whatever reason the command wasn't received.
We dont know the timing. He may have issued the stop command as the crash was occuring
And these guys are tremendously overworked because the government can’t get its shit together to hire enough people to staff at appropriate levels.
"Government"? Let's call it what it is. ITYM "Republicans".
The shortage of ATC staff dates back to the Clinton Administration. It’s just hard to attract people into a 5+ year training program for a very stressful job where you might get bounced near the end with no payout and no transferrable job skills.
No the shortage goes back to Regan when their justified strike was busted. It ended the PATCO “union” and was a negative turning point for labour unions in general.
I think you mean Reagan. He removed the union for the ATC not Clinton.
Honestly, you can generally just blame Reagan for about anything. A presidency about weaking labor, strengthening Iran, and ballooning the deficit is uh never going to leave good traces.
Reagan did the right thing in that case. Government employees should never have collective bargaining rights. Public employee unions are contrary to the interests of taxpayers.
Over the course of the past year, I think we've seen more evidence that the federal workforce's collective bargaining rights aren't strong enough. Workers' employment contracts are being ignored, employees are being threatened, constructively terminated, all in an attempt to enact RIFs without following the law.
Things are happening to the federal workforce right now that aren't even legal in the private sector.
If contracts are violated then the impacted parties can seek redress through the courts. Government employee unions aren't needed for that.
You have to have your contract violated for a significant amount before you can notionally afford to hire a lawyer to fight it out. Below 5 figures it doesn't make much financial sense to do that for most people, so they just eat it instead. It's how a lot of "theft of wages" and other mistreatment happens so often. Lawyers don't take those cases for free, and court isn't free either. And you're not going to instantly appear at the top of the docket for something small like that especially if the government buries you in procedure. They can do that for years.
But sure, yeah you can seek redress through the courts.
The result of some of the issues at hand might not even be damages, but simply to realign policies with what the law requires.... which may no longer be relevant for someone who lost a job a year ago and has since moved on out of necessity.
And this admin doesn't simply stop an initiative when courts block them, they find a new "creative interpretation" to do the same thing, and carry on for however long it takes the next trial to happen.
Suing the federal government solo is an insurmountable task for most people -- even more so while they're being constructively terminated. Employee unions have been suing on their workers behalf over the past year, but the executive branch can drag out federal trials for a lot longer than people can stay without a job.
Centralization of all power in the government is also contrary to the interests of the taxpayers.
Every time i see an anti-union article, its usually about unions that do good union things...
But noone ever complains about the police union. It's always the public goods people like ATC or teachers.
People complain about police unions all the time, it's just their complainants don't overlap much with the people who complain about private sector unions.
Does your comment also include the police union(s)?
Yes absolutely. They're a perfect example of the unique issues w/ collective bargaining for public services.
Yes, absolutely. No government employees should ever have collective bargaining rights. If they want better wages and working conditions then they can advocate for those through the political process, the same as any other citizen.
In your suggestion any other citizen has collective bargaining at their disposal, do they not?
Collective bargaining rights shouldn’t even be a separate thing. They’re just a natural consequence of the fact that free speech is protected and slavery is illegal. The idea of an illegal strike is bizarre.
This is a discussion with nearly unanimous agreement that poor ATC working conditions are causing Americans to die in preventable aviation accidents.
Maybe this is the one evidence-driven case where you can be open minded about the value of a public employee union?
Nope. Public employee unions bring zero value and this incident is not evidence to support such unions. Relying on unions to act as ersatz safety regulators would be stupid, just completely the wrong approach. Decisions about things like ATC procedures, staffing levels, and training standards should be the responsibility of apolitical career bureaucrats.
Public employee unions are contrary to the interests of taxpayers
This is not obvious on its face, but also, paying taxes is not my only concern wrt the civil society in which I live.
Not just attract, it also has very high standards. And many people fail out.
Somehow Europe manages to do that well enough.
ATC/GTC seems like a really strong candidate for partial automation with recent advances in AI. Obviously we'd still want some expert humans in the loop for exceptional situations, but I have to imagine there's a way to significantly reduce the cognitive burden/stress for these folks.
Recent advances in AI aren't useful for routine operations in safety critical domains such as aviation because we don't know how to verify and test them. An LLM is effectively an unpredictable black box with unknown failure modes. There is opportunity for greater automation but probably based on classical deterministic programming.
In addition to this, LLMs are also simply too slow right now to deliver the results ATC would need.
Ridiculous to see people acting like LLMs are a silver bullet for every problem without putting any thought into what that would actually look like.
This goes much deeper than just A vs B. As long as you Americans keep thinking this way, it will all remain the same sadly.
Yes. Reagan was a Republican.
No, I mean government. This has been a problem for a long time and there hasn't been any serious effort to improve the situation by anyone.
Yup, it's been a problem ever since Regan (a Republican) fired over 11,000 ATC employees. And by "anyone" ITYM "republicans" again, because Democrats have been trying for years.
See this article from 2017: https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2017/06/house-democrats-in...
How many years since Reagan have Democrats held both chambers of Congress and the White House? It’s a few. And yet we’re still here.
That's because all the Democrats are Republicans.
"”The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican,” - Barack Obama [0]
[0] https://thehill.com/policy/finance/137156-obama-says-hed-be-...
This is not a statement of Republicans and Democrats being the same, but a statement of Republicans going off the deep end in during and after Reagan.
Obama was a very moderate Democrat for his time. If you go back in time a moderate Democrat and Republican were similar because the "center" was more reasonable. Now the "center" is just people that are ashamed that they vote Republican.
If we accept that, then "government" and "Republicans" would be pretty much synonymous, so my original point stands. (Not that I accept it, but even if I did.)
Another option: they shouldn't be government employees at all. It would be much better for them to work for the actual airports themselves and be certified by the government or a private testing organization instead.
LaGuardia, like many (most?) airports, is run by the government. This is a distinction without a difference, at least in this case.
Which government? State, Federal, City, or a Port Commission? There is in fact a significant distinction between the responsibilities and capabilities of each of these levels of government and you can't lump them all together. My home airport is operated by a port commission, which is government, but the port commission's task is to operate the ports.
>There is in fact a significant distinction between the responsibilities and capabilities of each of these levels of government and you can't lump them all together.
But all private businesses have the same responsibilities and capabilities and therefore can be lumped together as one entity? The asymmetry in how you're critiquing the way this is discussed ends up revealing your bias.
LaGuardia is not ran by a local government, not the Federal Government.
I genuinely have no idea what point you’re trying to make here. Do state governments not count as governments?
There’s a lot of ATC that isn’t specific to a single airport. And lots of airports are owned by a government anyway.
> our civilization relies upon workers to shoulder the burden everyday.
Our civilization? Nah. Just that one shithole country. Greatest country in the world and they schedule a single guy to work both tower and ground frequencies at a major airport, it's almost like they're asking for this shit to happen.
And before anyone mentions understaffing, this literally one of the plethora of problems that the rest of the world figured out while the U.S. continues to act special.
As long as the cost of an accident is lower than the cost of fixing the system this will continue to happen.
This is one of many examples of why capitalism needs to be kept in check with democratic government oversight. Sometimes the financial incentives are not high enough to warrant changing the system.
I'm curious about what kind of visualization does the ATC have at the disposal about the current occupancy of the individual tarmac segments? I'd assume if an airplane is approaching for landing on a specific runway, that runway should have been clearly marked as restricted for access until the plane would actually land and clear it?
In the US, airplanes can be cleared for landing while the runway is occupied (you can be number two, three, etc. for landing and still be cleared). It's different in other countries, where you can only be issued a landing clearance if the runway is clear or anticipated to be clear before you land (e.g. the plane before you is already exiting the runway).
Still, the runway could be reserved for landing aircrafts only, still preventing access to all other types of vehicles.
How are fire trucks supposed to respond to incidents involving airplanes, as it appears this case involves, if the runway is off limits to them?
The way it's supposed to work, the ground controller first verifies that there are no traffic conflicts before clearing vehicles to cross an active runway.
Which is exactly what failed here, so saying "it shouldn't fail by not failing" doesn't help terribly much.
Having grade-separate crossings for vehicles might, but that introduces new issues (plane skidding off runway could hit the incline and break up).
O’Hare has those but it’s not helpful for emergencies that happen on the runway itself.
Well, sure, but in that case it's expected that the runway is closed.
How did it end up like that with the nose up: what is holding it up?
Gravity. The aircraft is heavier at the back, where the engines are. With the nose severely damaged/missing, the centre of gravity has shifted aft, so what’s left of the nose is sticking up in the air.
Front fell off, people deplaned (while still horizontal) which shifted the balance backwards. It’s sitting on the rear bulkhead,
I guess there is more weight in the relatively small section of the front that came off than I expected
It's balance, you don't need a large difference in weight for it to tilt backwards.
I’d guess the front landing gear assembly is going to be fairly heavy, and appears to be missing. This model of plane also has its engines at the rear, not under the wing, which will move the balance to the back.
Oh yeah that definitely makes sense
Planes typically have their center of gravity just forward of the rear wheels. This makes it easier to rotate on takeoff.
The margins are thin enough that certain planes will sometimes have people in the back get off first, before the people on the front, to avoid tipping onto the tail like this.
I have been on small aircraft where some of the larger passengers (me, at about 100kg, and a couple of other guys my size) were asked to sit a little further back for the takeoff but move up front and get off last because of the difference in balance as the fuel was used.
Google "weight and balance" if you'd like an in-depth answer.
According to other news sources, the pilots lost their lives here, too.
The entire cockpit, front toilet and galley area, and probably a front row seat have all been utterly destroyed. Unfortunately I'd be amazed if the death toll stays at two.
Avoidable catastrophes indiced as a measurement of cultural decline?
Are the increased number of air incidents since Dec 2024 reflective of anything real or is it more attention on something? Brigida v. USDOT comes to mind but doesn't seem relevant. I'm sure we could all construct a chain of "this thing happened that caused that which caused this" and so on, but I'm curious if someone has done the effort to see whether such a chain is defensible.
Also, did the pilots die in the collision or in some sort of aftermath? The cockpit looks absolutely smashed.
I am not aware of any data that supports the claim that there are more incidents in recent history. The safest years were, of course, the COVID-19 shutdown years, when air-travel was greatly reduced. But besides that the last couple of years has been overall safer than the years before COVID-19.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...
The 2025 crash near DCA, of course, absolutely spiked the number of recent commercial aviation deaths, but we haven't had any other aviation tragedies of that magnitude in more than a decade.
This can be a preventable tragedy without there needing to be a conspiracy behind it.
You can probably construct a realistic chain of failure that goes all the way back to political tomfoolery and bad air traffic control leadership/staffing decisions, but that makes the wrong people look bad, so they'll probably blame individuals further down the totem pole like the controller or pilot and call it a day.
Ah so you think it is Brigida. I get what you mean. I had to obscure that in order to ask the question.
No, absolutely not. This has nothing to do with Brigida. I'm not being vague here. When I say political tomfoolery and leadership decisions, I'm not alluding to race or discrimination. I am talking about more plausible and straightforward causes: their decisions to not modernize ATC, and to keep ATC staffed at a skeleton level for decades.
I see. Who are the “wrong people” then? Pointing fingers at politicians over lack of funding is so routine I doubt any of them would be more than mildly inconvenienced by that. Certainly not to the degree where they’d conspire to hide it.
The wrong people would be the class that never seems to take the fall: Director+ decisionmakers and policymakers.
Yet another blow to the confidence of flying in this country.
More accurately, the risk has increased by at least one order of magnitude, but the confidence of the public has largely stayed the same.
This comes to mind how during the Boeing news scandals, commenters would confidently argue "Flying is still ridiculously safe, statistically speaking", "these things happen every day, just underreported", and "you/people are irrational for not flying Boeing". It's a very curious argument to me. Is the ATC infrastructure issue analogous or not, etc.
You can view the actual data and control for your own recency bias one way or the other. I see data from 2005 - 2024 trivially accessible.
https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/Pages/research.aspx
You can have both. I.e. complain about safety breaches, push to get back on track safety wise, but still decide to fly as it is safe enough. Guess it is being practical.
It is strange. What is importa t is, are things getting better or getting worse? As they say, it’s not the fall that kills, bit the impact. Are we falling?
Maybe US media, hardly an unbiased news source about US events, especially when hundreds of billions are flying around about incompetent massive employer and lobbyist.
Nowhere else in the world you would hear such statements. Boeings simply disappeared from Europe, those few that were here before. I am sure they are still used somewhere but I haven't flown any in past 7-8 years. Heck, I haven't seen any in South east Asia neither (but that may be due to luck).
I check this with all bookings, no way I am flying that piece of shit if I can anyhow avoid that, not alone and quadruple that with family.
> Boeings simply disappeared from Europe
That is just simply false. There are many boeings flying in europe. Just by randomly clicking around on flightradar24 I found multiple right now in the air.
Ryanair are the biggest airline in Europe and they exclusively fly Boeing 737s.
Grok how many people die on their commute to work in their deathtrap cars
Grok timed out but here is perplexity
Per 100 million miles traveled
This means driving has roughly 190 times the fatality rate per mile as commercial flying in the U.S.umm u should never drive again. in fact never leave your apartment/house.
You're not going to die in a car crash.
You're going to die of heart disease caused by your poor diet.
You should never eat again. No, wait, stop, I mean...
It should be noted that aircraft and all other vehicle and personel movements on an airport are controlled from the airtraffic control tower by air traffic controllers or directly by individual flaggers, as directed from the tower. Or at least thats the way it is supposed to work, and of course the operation at a place like LaGuardia is more complex, and will have specialists and multiple zones. What will put an extra edge on this is the whole ICE thing, and airport chaos pulling the roof down.
> What will put an extra edge on this is the whole ICE thing, and airport chaos pulling the roof down.
How would the ICE thing cause more ground traffic collisions. Are you thinking ATC controllers are illegal immigrants and they’re going to run away during their shift? I just don’t see a connection there…
This incident caused delays and cancellations that ripple throughout an already understaffed network of TSA checkpoints. ICE presence will make airport security somehow an even worse experience for brown people.
Not the crash, but the aftermath. Passengers will be showing up for flights today, nervous with the crash on their minds, and many will then encounter untrained goons cosplaying as airport security.
I could see that, yeah.
The comments in /r/aviation see to think it’s a one (tired) man show at night.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1s16x61/comment/o...
> "I visited them both in the hospital, as has the chairman, and they were able to speak and we're notifying their families," said Garcia.
Let's get the important parts out of the way first: We in charge have taken care of optics, with regard to our offices.
Oh, and we're going to contact families eventually.
This should not be on HN, especially not the front page. Do better.
That's a huge amount of damage even at 24mph. It's crazy how that could happen though. Will be interesting to see the full report.
The fire truck was flipped and moved to the side of the runway, this was not 24mph. 24mph is the final groundspeed recorded after the aircraft skidded off of the runway.
Per the ADSBx track the plane was at 101kts (115 mph / 185kph) just before crossing taxiway D, which would be where it hit the firetruck. It still had enough energy afterwards to reach taxiway E, 600ft away.
Okay that makes far more sense the article didn’t really make that clear to me.
The results seem on the high end but they check out at first glance.
A plane is basically a flimsy tube. A firetruck is a solid brick comparatively. The plane out weighs the fire truck by a lot and out speeds it by a lot. So yeah, destroying the whole front of the plane to punt the truck it sounds about right for a 25 on 5 or 35 on 10/15 type rear ending to me. Flipping doesn't really sound that unreasonable considering that the plane made contact with the top of the truck (just by virtue of comparative height) and contact may not have been straight on. Even if it left the pavement on it's wheels airport firefighters aren't exactly who I'd bet on (they're middle of the pack) to keep the truck on it's wheels if they got surprise kicked off the road especially if there's an embankment involved.
A CRJ 9000 is 70000 lbs empty, 84500 lbs MTOW.
An Oshkosh 1500 4x4 is 62000 lbs GVWR (wiki says kerb weight but it’s incorrect).
The plane was landing and the truck was heading to an intervention, so they were likely close to empty and to GVWR respectively.
And again, 25mph is the final ground speed, after the plane punted the truck and kept on going for 600ft.
>25mph is the final ground speed
Wouldn't final ground speed be zero?
Final ground speed reported.
Pause the video at 13 sec. That firetruck is awfully intact for something that allegedly got hit at high speed. Basically just a bunch of top side sheetmetal damage (concentrated to the rear, obviously). In any case it didn't even get sent hard enough to screw up the cab exterior. And on the flip side, if you keep cranking the speed up you start getting to where the plane starts looking too suspiciously intact. There's just not much room to work backwards from the apparent results and get a high difference in speed or get very high initial speeds (100 onto 75 or whatever). If the plane was going fast the truck had to be going fast too or there'd be more carnage. But if they were both going fast you'd expect more damage from the after the fact barrel roll and the plane and truck to be a little farther apart in distance.
Fire truck is filled to brim with gear and doesn't care all that much about weight, plane is the opposite of that, lightness is money, so it makes sense fire truck looks better after crash than plane
Where’s the video you’re referring to?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HEFF17eaYAA_sgq?format=jpg
I can’t tell what’s the truck and what’s the remains of the plane in this pic.
Another wider angle:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HEFDcS4bwAA8uu7?format=png&name=...
There’s no way this scene happens from a plane colliding with a truck at 24mph.
I'm talking about the headline video from TFA.
The back of a firetruck is not a working implement like a dump truck is nor is it sufficiently strong for mounting a crane or man bucket like utility bodies often are It's a bunch of sheetmetal boxes to hold stuff and cover stuff and there's a water tank back there somewhere. In the middle down low some pumps are buried. Basically don't think of it as being any more structural than a box truck body because it's not. All that stuff got shredded, obviously, since they're only really meant to bear their own weight and were subject to all the truck tossing forces here. Beyond that the truck is in pretty good shape. It's not uncommon for a good "off the highway and into the ditch" crash to rip tandems off, twist frames, etc. None of that has happened here. The plane is pretty rough, but that's expected. They are 100% tin cans. Ground equipment moving at idle speeds will absolutely shred them before the operator even feels resistance. A goose hit square on the leading edge of a small jet's wing will put a massive dent in (and apply red paint, lol).
24 sounds about right for a closing speed for plane onto truck. Whatever the baseline speed of the truck was cannot have been that high or the truck would be absolutely shredded from the barrel roll and as it stand the cab is barely pushed in.
The article dropped the speed claim.
The last recorded ground speed data of 24mph also shows a wildly different heading (going from 30deg ish to 170ish). So it probably happened after the collision and was part of its deceleration. As far as I know, the truck would have been crossing the runway so the effective speed perpendicular to the plane would be zero except for directional shear I guess.
> A firetruck is a solid brick comparatively.
I think you'd be surprised. The cab is quite solid because it has to conform to certain vehicle design and safety criteria (at least here in Europe).
The rest of it is made of fairly squashy aluminium box section with panels TIG welded on. There's not a lot left if one of them gets rolled, for example.
> That's a huge amount of damage even at 24mph.
The speed was much higher per sibling comment, but also remember that kinetic energy also involves mass (planes are heavy) and the square of the velocity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy
The latter is why (e.g.) going 100 units/hour has twice the KE of going 70 units/hour in a car.
It looks like that is based on the last recorded speed from flightradar24[1] which was 21kts(24mph). The previous data points were 11kts, and 58 kts(the last point before the track deviates off the runway). I do think it is likely that the collision occurred at a speed faster than 24mph.
edit: Looking into this a bit more it looks like the plane came to a stop around crossing E while the emergency vehicle was crossing at D(based on ATC recordings). Using the following map as reference[2], the 58kts point was around E, while the previous recorded point which was just before D was 114kts.
[1] https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/ac8646#3ede6c39
[2] https://www.flightaware.com/resources/airport/LGA/APD/AIRPOR...
Very unlikely it was 24mph…The entire cockpit is gone.
(Though some of the major damage may have happened while deplaning the passengers)
On other hand planes are really not designed to be crashed into things. Only for limited impacts. So we might not have right comparison for relatively thin and aimed to be light structure being impacted by bulkier object.
Speed doesn't cause damage. Momentum causes damage. We understand speed, we do not understand momentum. It makes sense given our evolution.
People into boats need to understand this. Even a boat that travels no more than 4mph can crush you easily. This is why you never get on to moving boat from the front. Many people have made a mistake because speed is not high.
Tugboats bump other boats all day. Hundred thousand pound pieces of machinery bury themselves into the dirt. All this as part of normal operation. It's not that simple.
Speed, kinetic energy and acceleration are all interrelated and at the end of the day it's all forces (to some extent) and no amount of hand wringing commentary is going to replace genuine understanding of them.
I saw the first post about this on /r/flying and /r/aviation 5 hours ago and legacy media is only started reporting it in the last hour or so
/r/xyz doesnt need to fact check. Sure those are excellent subs but just being watering holes and not legal entities they can move faster. There were some wrong facts on r/aviation although it got viral so people just ploughed in with whatever news outlet they read it on.
I have seen a lot of first posts on social media which have been wrong
Nope.
CNN, CNBC, NYPost, Guardian all had stories up quickly, or around an hour. There are others too.
UPDATED:
Down-votes happen but disappointing since I'm stating facts. Heres some backup:
The user haunter said media started reporting around ~4 AM EST (based on timestamps).
The accident happened at 11:40 PM EST. Story publish times across a sample of various legacy/mainstream media orgs:
There are others.Is this a dig on legacy media? Do we expect people to be up all hours of the day reporting the news?
I got a NYT alert about this around 3:30am EDT.
Yes. Yes, we do. I expect a competent news agency to have a night desk.
Why though? To report to the people who are asleep?
And so much of the legacy media info is wrong. It’s strange because a lot of the primary sources are public.
This is a good overview so far:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8vokLcNNGCM
Very informative, thanks for the link!
ATC audio is https://archive.liveatc.net/klga/KLGA-Twr-Mar-23-2026-0330Z....
The clearance for AC8646 to land on runway 4 is given in a sequence starting at 4:58. "Vehicle needs to cross the runway" at 6:43. Truck 1 and company asks for clearance to cross 4 at 6:53. Clearance is granted at 7:00. Then ATC asks both a Frontier and Truck 1 to stop, voice is hurried and it's confusing.
> And so much of the legacy media info is wrong. It’s strange because a lot of the primary sources are public.
You should provide sources for a claim like that. For example, what in the BBC article is wrong?
If only we could diff the BBC article (it currently says it was posted 21 mins ago which is younger than your comment…). It’s changed multiple times now without any kind of changelog or acknowledgement.
> Video footage on social media showed the aircraft, which is operated by Air Canada's regional partner Jazz aviation, coming to a rest with its nose upturned.
This just isn’t true. There’s no video of the plane coming to a rest with its nose upturned (which implies motion). The upturned nose happened only after passengers deplaned and the balance shifted.
> It had slowed to about 24mph when it collided with a vehicle from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.
This is the next part that will change. Just because some of the last broadcast data said 24mph doesn’t mean that’s the speed it was when it collided with the truck. The truck is on its side and those passengers are in hospital. The pilots are dead. The plane sustained enough structural damage to have the entire nose collapse. If the sentence is based on that broadcast data, SAY THAT instead of printing it as fact.
And with all the quotes from social media posts from key groups, link to them instead of just vaguely quoting.
EDIT:
As expected, they got rid of the above paragraph claiming the speed. It now says:
“The plane was arriving from Montreal and had landed, before colliding with the vehicle from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.”
Any of us can help log the changes by submitting revisions of the article to web.archive.org
With a fast-changing news story where vague/incomplete/conflicting details emerge in the first few hours it's not unreasonable for the first few revisions to be like that, and eventually gets fixed hours or a day later.
I think that’s what’s critical here. Post details and their sources to show that they are in flux. Don't write them as fact and then make secret edits.
Typically most primary sources are public.
It's hardly worth checking with the legacy media anymore. Really, why bother?
Why bother with the facts when you're already heard all the gossip?
At the very least it’s worth reading to see what most people / the people in power are reading or want others to read.
The NYT is biased, but it’s still basically the most official newspaper of the American ruling class.
Because some of them still have standards. They will correct themselves if something was wrong.
Everyone can write a comment on Reddit / make a podcast / video / whatever claiming whatever they want. Unless you already know and trust them (which requires you to be able to cross-check their information), it's potentially as useful as a random LLM hallucination. Could be brilliantly spot on, or could be completely nonsense. No way of knowing unless you already know enough. (Because even cross-checking won't necessarily save you, if you cross-check multiple bullshit sources).
Media with standards (like the BBC, Guardian, Liberation, etc.) will do their best to report truthfully (even if sometimes with some bias), and will fix their mistakes if they're caught later on or the story evolves. Independent media checking organisations have shown time and time again that there is trustworthy media, you just need to know which it is, and always take a pinch of salt. It's wild to me that people will just dismiss rags such as Fox News and relatively quality media like Guardian in the same breath.
So the truck just crosses a runway because the ground controller said it was OK? Do ground vehicle drivers not take a half a second to look both ways before crossing a runway? It would have prevented this. Safely through redundant checks.
Everybody knows better on the internet.
Raining, misting. The plane may have been up in cloud cover when they looked and decided to enter the runway. Hard to judge the distance and trajectory of planes. Once the firetruck started moving, they may have seen it without time to gun it or back up.
> It would have prevented this.
Wow.
Yes. To have to do a certification to drive on the apron. There are all sorts of rules about being careful to cross the runway. I imagine they were rushing to the 'emergency'. To hit a plane there must have been multiple mistakes. The swiss cheese thing.
Introduce a foreign object onto the runway and it will inevitably collide with an aircraft. The fire trucks aren't part of the airport traffic management system, their sudden presence is bound to lead to problems eventually.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the truck has a single radio (airplanes always have two) and was constantly switching between ATC and fire house frequencies. The probably never heard the "stop, stop, stop stop.."
It would also not surprise me if airports previously had dedicated fire services, which have since been outsourced for cost reasons.
This is an airport-specific vehicle that was on radio with ATC at the time and had clearance to cross the runway. Nothing in your comment is correct.
And yet you chose to respond! Indeed I stand corrected on the onsite firehouse, LaGuardia does have one but many airports do not.
Bullshit. Pretty much every airport that handles FAA Part 121 flights has dedicated firefighting apparatus and crews.
According to this article, the air traffic controller gave the fire truck permission to cross the runway. So, it seems like they are part of the air traffic management system?
> The fire trucks aren't part of the airport traffic management system
Yes they are.