[notRobot]

There was a single traffic controller handling the entire airport. This was bound to happen and will keep happening unless things change. It's absurd that the US hasn't been able to fix its ATC shortage in decades.

Currently over 41% of facilities are reliant on mandatory overtime, with controllers frequently working 60-hour weeks with only four days off per month.

[kevmo]

The US intentionally created the ATC shortage. From Wikipedia:

The PATCO Strike of 1981 was a union-organized work stoppage by air traffic controllers (ATCs) in the United States. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) declared a strike on August 3, 1981, after years of tension between controllers and the federal government over long hours, chronic understaffing, outdated equipment, and rising workplace stress. Despite 13,000 ATCs striking, the strike ultimately failed, as the Reagan administration was able to replace the striking ATCs, resulting in PATCO's decertification.

The failure of the PATCO strike impacted the American labor movement, accelerating the decline in labor unions in the country, and initiating a much more aggressive anti-union policy by the federal government and private sector employers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

[FL410]

This. Go look at the atc subreddit, controllers have been begging for help for ages. This isn't one guy's fault.

[adgjlsfhk1]

>This isn't one guy's fault.

Counterpoint. It's Regen's fault. He's the guy who decided that a high priority of the government was making sure air traffic controllers had no power to fight back against being horrifically overworked (because unions are evil you see)

[jordanb]

One thing people forget is that the key complaints PATCO's members had were:

  1. outdated equipment
  2. staffing levels
  3. workload and fatigue

Reagan went to war with the union instead of addressing these things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

[voxic11]

Wasn't it Congress who passed 5 U.S.C. § 7311. which says a person may not “accept or hold” a federal job if they “participate in a strike” against the U.S. government.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311

originally passed as

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=2023&num=0&req=g...

So arguably if Reagan had not fired them he would be failing to uphold the laws of the United States.

[adgjlsfhk1]

They were striking for less outdated tools, improving staffing levels, and other safety improvements.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

[sonar_un]

Pretty much everything broken in the USA stems directly from Reagen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g95fiZCzjlo

[antonymoose]

I’m not saying he didn’t ignore a real problem - but it’s been 45 years since the 1981 airline strike. Surely the blame ought to be spread around our incompetent Federal government.

[phendrenad2]

This is mostly nonsense, by the way. While Reagan won his presidential elections by a huge margin, he never had the House of Representatives on his side, only the Senate. So it's not like he had a unique position to make changes that hasn't happened since. In fact, any government since then could have undone any or all of these "everything broken in the USA" things. But they didn't. Probably because people like, oh, the viewers of this video, will keep blaming a dead president instead of them. Hah! It's beautiful in a way...

[coryrc]

You don't need a union to have effective management. It should also be their incentive not to cause people's death by overworking employees. Which is also dumb because it costs more to overwork then hire appropriately with overtime laws... cops exploit this all the time to steal money from taxpayers. (The ones in Seattle only get caught when they accidently charge over 24 hours of overtime in a day)

Union rules that say only a particular classification of employee is allowed to pick up a small package from a loading dock and move it twenty feet are also bad.

The blame can go to the top, for not managing correctly.

[achierius]

> It should also be their incentive

You can't just proclaim what incentives should be. We do have a mechanism for changing the incentives of management though: it's called unions.

[coryrc]

If it was a traveler's union, maybe. Cop unions don't result in better outcomes for the general public, and there's no reason a controller's union won't end up just boosting pay and having a rubber room for hacks (referencing NYC schools paying teachers to not work because they're either predators or terrible at teaching, but being unable to fire them).

[denkmoon]

Try looking outside the US to see how unions work without being crushed by 100 years of anti union legislation. Also police unions are a joke.

[wahnfrieden]

A traveler's union? So there is no solution you see?

[jen20]

There have been six presidents who could have addressed this since Reagan. Every one of them shoulders some of the responsibility.

[_ph_]

Yes, they should all have taken actions. But also, it is much more difficult to fix something broken once the damage has settled in. I guess none of them was willing to risk the disruption a fix would have caused. And the system seemed to have held up for quite a while. Weren't there some mass firings of ATC personal at the beginning of the Trump presidency?

The bottom line is: don't break things that are difficult or impossible to fix.

[jen20]

The is a good idea, but once they are broken, you should at least try to fix them, or bear some of the blame for not having tried.

[_ph_]

Absolutely. But for many things, denial is easier than fixing. See climate change. We knew about the problem for a long time. At latest after the oil crisis in the early 70ies, it would have been the perfect moment to reduce fossil fuel usage. Of course we know, how this has not happened and so we just entered the next oil crisis last week. And everyone is to blame for that.

[newsclues]

Or instead of pointing fingers we can uses our brains to solve the problems and increase safety.

You could spend a ton of time and money automating the process, and probably should especially in the future with the proliferation of drones.

But in the meantime there are simple solutions. Tunnels. No ground vehicles should be crossing runways when then could go under.

[wsbetter]

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

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

[busterarm]

The issue is the shortage, which that doesn't address. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Was in three different unions. Union didn't do squat for me. Mainly kept my wages down and gave the friends of the union rep the best shifts.

[anonymars]

Firing them all broke the pipeline

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495739

[busterarm]

When I don't show up to work I expect to get fired and not rehired too.

[MisterTea]

When I heard about the crash I immediately recalled the recent articles about ATC shortages and overworked ATC's. And here we are. ONE dude running ATC for LaGuardia. Mind boggling.

I place no blame on the ATC as they were doing everything they could given the shit sandwich they were handed. I see this happening all over with staffs getting pared down to minimums, more (sometimes unpaid) over time, prices going up, and no raises.

[m_fayer]

I’m not trying to minimize a tragedy, but maybe this is almost the perfect wake up call?

Not many fatalities but nevertheless a spectacular collision. At a major hub airport in a major city. It’s hard to look away from, the cause is obvious, and all that without hundreds of deaths.

[amiga386]

The perfect wake up call before this perfect wake up call was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col...

Imagine how good the next wake up call will be!

See also Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster: https://theonion.com/preemptive-memorial-honors-future-victi...

[littlexsparkee]

they hit snooze

[HoldOnAMinute]

There are no "wake up calls" in America. If nothing changed after Sandy Hook, then nothing was ever going to change.

In the future, you'll wear your cow collar, own nothing, and like it.

[MisterTea]

It's not minimizing, it's galvanizing. 100% A wake up call. I don't fly much but I was bothered by the earlier ATC stories and now I don't feel safe at all.

[rationalist]

Flying is still safer than driving.

[downrightmike]

Much less so for the last 14 months

[amiga386]

Agreed. There are a whole bucketload of problems, each one contributing to the staff shortage. The US has problems that other countries don't have (or have less of). It's a long-term organisational issue. None of it is insurmountable, but things need to be done differently, and the politics of that may be insurmountable.

Being an air-traffic controller anywhere in the world is a very intense job at times, and needs a huge amount of proficiency that only a small number of people are capable of doing. Couple that with:

- the FAA expects you to move to where ATCs are needed, so many of the qualified applicants give up when they hear where the posting is. You can't force them to take the job!

- the technology is decades out of date and the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (it's seriously called that) won't roll out until 2028 at the earliest

- Obama's FAA disincentivised its traditional "feeder" colleges that do ATC courses to "promote diversity", net outcome was fewer applicants

- Regan broke the union in the 1980s

- DOGE indiscriminately decimated the FAA like it did most other government departments

[haberman]

> Obama's FAA disincentivised its traditional "feeder" colleges that do ATC courses to "promote diversity", net outcome was fewer applicants

It was much worse than that. Students who had already spent years studying to be air traffic controllers through the CTI program were subject to a sudden policy change that disqualified them from entering the profession unless they passed a “biographical questionnaire.”

85% of candidates failed this questionnaire, but the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (the organization that pushed for this change to begin with) was feeding the “right” answers to its own members.

“Right” answers included things like having gotten bad grades in high school science class. You can take the test for yourself here and see how you score: https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

I can’t blame anyone for thinking this sounds too outrageous to be real, but all of it is public record at this point and the subject of an ongoing lawsuit: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...

[tavavex]

This test is completely insane. What were the people making it thinking? It feels like half of the scored questions have point values assigned at random. Why does being unemployed for 1-2 months before enrolling in the program award you 10 points, 5-6 months is 8 points, yet 3-4 is a fat zero? There's so many questions with these random score assignments. Why does having real qualifications related to your job only give you a point or two, but some random factoid like taking unrelated courses or doing poorly in college history give upwards of 15 points? Why is child labor rewarded, with more points given the earlier you started?

Unless I'm missing something, this couldn't have been designed by a human being with normal goals in mind. This feels like a test that was created to act as a locked door that you could only pass by knowing the exact password, the sequence of lies you had to produce. That anyone's career was at the mercy of THIS is deranged. What the hell is going on in the US?

[2c0m]

I actually looked into becoming an ATC controller a year or two ago (I love aviation) and they had an age cap of ~30 to start training. I'm 32, so ruled out.

[irishcoffee]

31. If you had started 2 years ago you should have been fine.

[mikpanko]

According to NYT it seems like there were 2 controllers and “2 more in the building”. They also wrote that 2 seems normal for the late slower time of the night.

Not saying this is the right number of controllers to have, just sharing what I read in NYT.

[itopaloglu83]

Setting people up for failure and then using them as scapegoats, this simply infuriates me.

Expecting a single person to consistently keep their mental picture clear and perfect for their entire career is asinine and irresponsible.

We need systems and tools to eliminate such errors and support people, not use them as a person to blame when things inevitably go wrong.

[journal]

Why drain resources training more controllers when we're having energy collapse? Even if they start pumping oil, it will only delay the inevitable. What would we do with all the extra controllers if we have to fire them in ten years anyway?

[frenchtoast8]

From the article:

> But he [Sean Duffy] denied rumors that the tower had only one controller on duty.

[amelius]

I'm going to make myself unpopular and ask if an AI could have prevented this accident.

[blitzar]

You are absolulety right, the blockchain could have prevented this accident

[dehrmann]

You don't need modern AI; you can build a system that does voice recognition, models the airport and airspace, and applies looks for violations.

Actually, you might be able to try this. Live ATC and radar is available.