[cjrp]

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.

[brownieeee]

They were indeed the only controller, working both ground and tower frequencies.

[the_mitsuhiko]

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?

[ryandrake]

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.

[ultrarunner]

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".

[ryandrake]

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.

[bombcar]

Perhaps in a scenario where there is an active emergency and one controller, protocol should be that ground and air frequencies are combined.

That would have given the jet a chance to hear the truck cleared to cross the runway they were landing on.

[blitzar]

Even with multiple staff - the ATC person clearing you to drive across the runway should be the same ATC person doing takeoff / landings on that runway.

The audio sounds unsure when giving the clearance - but possibly hindsight ears at work.

[wk_end]

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.

[cpncrunch]

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.

[fakedang]

Agreed, but isn't O'Hare the busiest airport in the US?

Edit:- It's Atlanta.

[rkomorn]

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.

[rhcom2]

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.

[tejohnso]

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.

[jachee]

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.

[morkalork]

Something like that just might happen

[cameldrv]

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.

[_moof]

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.

[johnbarron]

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...

[banannaise]

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.

[crooked-v]

It's absolutely understaffing.

[ryandrake]

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.

[ultrarunner]

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.

[MrMember]

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.

[jjk166]

> 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.

[throwway120385]

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?

[selectodude]

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.

[wk_end]

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.

[arrowsmith]

Why not both? If it paid better then more people would apply to ATC school.

[f1shy]

It IS insane. Specially for LGA

[gmerc]

DOGED

[mmooss]

There were two controllers working (and two more in the building):

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/nyregion/faa-air-traffic-...

[caditinpiscinam]

That seems like too much for a single person to do, but I can also see how having too many controllers all trying to coordinate amongst themselves could be bad. How do airports determine the optimal number of controllers to have at a given time?

[hajile]

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.

[_moof]

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.

[deepsun]

The fire truck was cleared to cross the runway, but for an unknown reason it waited for 30 seconds before starting to cross.

[gameshot911]

I read that the emergency vehicle may have weighed 60,000 lbs. It can't stop quickly any more than an airplane can.

[hajile]

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.

[floatrock]

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.

[nradov]

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

[HDThoreaun]

> 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

[f1shy]

They did have a very explicit clearance.

The controller said “truck 1 stop” that is not ambiguous.

[embedding-shape]

> 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.

[tialaramex]

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.

[mrguyorama]

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!

[nradov]

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.

[fmobus]

You're saying they'd have to work without pay lest they loose their livelihoods? That's like one bit away from slavery.

[delichon]

Unemployment equals slavery belittles slavery.

[fmobus]

"One bit away"

[FuriouslyAdrift]

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.

[oncallthrow]

I’m always staggered by how stressed and tbh (not necessarily their fault given the circumstances) unprofessional US ATCs sound.

Sharp contrast with Europeans

[f1shy]

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.