[HN Gopher] Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle colli...
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Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia
https://avherald.com/h?article=536bb98e
Author : mememememememo
Score : 291 points
Date : 2026-03-23 07:24 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| spwa4 wrote:
| According to other news sources, the pilots lost their lives
| here, too.
| azalemeth wrote:
| 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.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| How did it end up like that with the nose up: what is holding it
| up?
| cschmatzler wrote:
| Front fell off, people deplaned (while still horizontal) which
| shifted the balance backwards. It's sitting on the rear
| bulkhead,
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I guess there is more weight in the relatively small section
| of the front that came off than I expected
| fredoralive wrote:
| 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.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Oh yeah that definitely makes sense
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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.
| ambicapter wrote:
| It's balance, you don't need a large difference in weight
| for it to tilt backwards.
| Reason077 wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| Google "weight and balance" if you'd like an in-depth answer.
| bilekas wrote:
| 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.
| whycome wrote:
| Very unlikely it was 24mph...The entire cockpit is gone.
|
| (Though some of the major damage may have happened while
| deplaning the passengers)
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| hiddendoom45 wrote:
| 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...
| masklinn wrote:
| 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.
| bilekas wrote:
| Okay that makes far more sense the article didn't really make
| that clear to me.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| masklinn wrote:
| 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.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| whycome wrote:
| 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&na
| me=...
|
| There's no way this scene happens from a plane colliding
| with a truck at 24mph.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| whycome wrote:
| 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| 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
| moralestapia wrote:
| >25mph is the final ground speed
|
| Wouldn't final ground speed be zero?
| organsnyder wrote:
| Final ground speed reported.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > 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.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _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.
| mcbain wrote:
| 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.
| xyst wrote:
| Yet another blow to the confidence of flying in this country.
| trvz wrote:
| More accurately, the risk has increased by at least one order
| of magnitude, but the confidence of the public has largely
| stayed the same.
| calf wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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?
| kakacik wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| > 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.
| patrickmcnamara wrote:
| Ryanair are the biggest airline in Europe and they
| exclusively fly Boeing 737s.
| LaffertyDev wrote:
| 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
| mememememememo wrote:
| 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.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| 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 Car driving:
| ~0.57 deaths per 100 million miles (recent U.S. data).
| Commercial air travel: ~0.003 deaths per 100 million miles.
|
| 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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| 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...
| twalichiewicz wrote:
| 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_...
| altmanaltman wrote:
| LaGuardia has that system, it still failed to prevent this
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| organsnyder wrote:
| > 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| 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
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| 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.
| fsh wrote:
| Many airports have ADS-B transponders in their ground vehicles.
| You can see them on flightradar or adsbexchange.
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| Ground vehicles with transponders:
| https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=Planes&zoom=7&lat=42.1262&lng=...
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| 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.
| mememememememo wrote:
| 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.
| naberhausj wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Even without anticipated clearance to land you have to define
| what "the runway is empty and yours" means.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _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).
| hajile wrote:
| 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.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| He asked Frontier 4195 to stop. By the time he asked truck 1
| to stop they were entering the runway.
| haunter wrote:
| 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
| whycome wrote:
| 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
| quotemstr wrote:
| It's hardly worth checking with the legacy media anymore.
| Really, why bother?
| sofixa wrote:
| 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.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| bregma wrote:
| Why bother with the facts when you're already heard all the
| gossip?
| Symbiote wrote:
| > 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?
| whycome wrote:
| 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."
| smcin wrote:
| 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.
| whycome wrote:
| 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.
| raphlinus wrote:
| 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.
| donohoe wrote:
| Typically most primary sources are public.
| tchalla wrote:
| I have seen a lot of first posts on social media which have
| been wrong
| chris_money202 wrote:
| Is this a dig on legacy media? Do we expect people to be up all
| hours of the day reporting the news?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yes. Yes, we do. I expect a competent news agency to have a
| night desk.
| chris_money202 wrote:
| Why though? To report to the people who are asleep?
| organsnyder wrote:
| I got a NYT alert about this around 3:30am EDT.
| mememememememo wrote:
| /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.
| donohoe wrote:
| 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:
| CNN - 12:47 AM NYPost - 12:47 AM The Guardian -
| 12:50 AM Associated Press (AP) - 1:31 AM Fox News -
| 1:47 AM Newsweek - 2:24 AM
|
| There are others.
| metalman wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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...
| rdtsc wrote:
| > 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...
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| rdtsc wrote:
| I could see that, yeah.
| tencentshill wrote:
| 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.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| 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.
| PierceJoy wrote:
| I mean, isn't it obvious that they didn't?
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's obvious that either they didn't, or they did but they
| didn't see the plane. We don't know which.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| gortok wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| 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.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| You can also see from the videos that they could have
| easily seen the plane.
| russdill wrote:
| 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.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| 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.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Do we know what the other emergency was? All the reporting I've
| seen has been very vague on this.
| ms7m wrote:
| Unrelated United aborted takeoff, as well as reported some
| odors in the cabin from the flight attendants.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Odors from the flight attendants? If they were paid better
| they could shower more frequently.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| 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
| hajile wrote:
| 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.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| 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.
| cjrp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They were indeed the only controller, working both ground and
| tower frequencies.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| 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?
| cameldrv wrote:
| 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.
| wk_end wrote:
| 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.
| fakedang wrote:
| Agreed, but isn't O'Hare the busiest airport in the US?
|
| Edit:- It's Atlanta.
| rkomorn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I don't envy anyone having to work in that airspace in
| any capacity.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| It's absolutely understaffing.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 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?
| jjk166 wrote:
| > 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.
| MrMember wrote:
| 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.
| selectodude wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Why not both? If it paid better then more people would
| apply to ATC school.
| selectodude wrote:
| ATC positions already have a very low chance of even
| getting a spot in ATC school. There are tons of
| applicants for every opening.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| f1shy wrote:
| It IS insane. Specially for LGA
| banannaise wrote:
| 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.
| johnbarron wrote:
| 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...
| _moof wrote:
| 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.
| tejohnso wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hajile wrote:
| 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.
| gameshot911 wrote:
| I read that the emergency vehicle may have weighed 60,000
| lbs. It can't stop quickly any more than an airplane can.
| hajile wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| There is no "the" issue in airline accidents. There are
| always multiple factors, that all had to happen.
|
| Understaffing is absolutely a factor.
|
| The ARFF truck not complying with the stop instruction is
| absolutely a factor
|
| And there are likely additional factors that will come out
| in the investigation.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You're saying they'd have to work without pay lest they
| loose their livelihoods? That's like one bit away from
| slavery.
| delichon wrote:
| Unemployment equals slavery belittles slavery.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| floatrock wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| f1shy wrote:
| They did have a very explicit clearance.
|
| The controller said "truck 1 stop" that is not ambiguous.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > 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
| IAmBroom wrote:
| > "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.
| newsclues wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| And these guys are tremendously overworked because the
| government can't get its shit together to hire enough people to
| staff at appropriate levels.
| callmeal wrote:
| "Government"? Let's call it what it is. ITYM "Republicans".
| tatersolid wrote:
| 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.
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| callmeal wrote:
| Does your comment also include the police union(s)?
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| rounce wrote:
| In your suggestion any other citizen has collective
| bargaining at their disposal, do they not?
| cake_robot wrote:
| Yes absolutely. They're a perfect example of the unique
| issues w/ collective bargaining for public services.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| If contracts are violated then the impacted parties can
| seek redress through the courts. Government employee
| unions aren't needed for that.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| superxpro12 wrote:
| 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.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| 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.
| fatbird wrote:
| _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.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| 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?
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| achr2 wrote:
| 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.
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| matthewkayin wrote:
| 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.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Somehow Europe manages to do that well enough.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Not just attract, it also has very high standards. And
| many people fail out.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Yes. Reagan was a Republican.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| callmeal wrote:
| 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...
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| pjmorris wrote:
| 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-...
| j_w wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.)
| k4rli wrote:
| 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.
| exabrial wrote:
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| LaGuardia, like many (most?) airports, is run by the
| government. This is a distinction without a difference, at
| least in this case.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| >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.
| exabrial wrote:
| LaGuardia is not ran by a local government, not the
| Federal Government.
| slg wrote:
| I genuinely have no idea what point you're trying to make
| here. Do state governments not count as governments?
| wat10000 wrote:
| There's a lot of ATC that isn't specific to a single
| airport. And lots of airports are owned by a government
| anyway.
| curiousgal wrote:
| > _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.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| We dont know the timing. He may have issued the stop command
| as the crash was occuring
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Ah so you think it is Brigida. I get what you mean. I had to
| obscure that in order to ask the question.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The wrong people would be the class that never seems to
| take the fall: Director+ decisionmakers and policymakers.
| shrx wrote:
| 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?
| cjrp wrote:
| 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).
| shrx wrote:
| Still, the runway could be reserved for landing aircrafts
| only, still preventing access to all other types of vehicles.
| danso wrote:
| 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?
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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).
| selectodude wrote:
| O'Hare has those but it's not helpful for emergencies
| that happen on the runway itself.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Well, sure, but in that case it's expected that the
| runway is closed.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| 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.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| > 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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
| red_admiral wrote:
| 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.
| f1shy wrote:
| 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
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I wonder if visibility was good enough that looking both
| ways before crossing the runway would have prevented
| this.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Or perhaps a "one controller" scenario is just terrible
| policy.
| f1shy wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| 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.)
| f1shy wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| 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.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >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.
| hypeatei wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| hypeatei wrote:
| 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.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| 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
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _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.
| thomas_witt wrote:
| 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.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >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/a
| irl...
| njovin wrote:
| 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.
| coryrc wrote:
| > 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.
| bryan_w wrote:
| The problem is knowing _before today_ how to handle the
| case where a ground vehicle isn 't across the runway in
| those 30 seconds.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| 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
| smallerize wrote:
| 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...
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _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?
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101d wrote:
| 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/ru
| nway_...
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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).
| throw0101d wrote:
| 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?
| bombcar wrote:
| 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_h
| tml...
|
| 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.
| lisper wrote:
| 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.
| brewdad wrote:
| 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.
| dpe82 wrote:
| My very fuzzy back of the envelope says easily 10s of
| thousands per day.
| snitty wrote:
| 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/runw
| ay_...
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| No one said it was simple. You're tilting at windmills.
| dpark wrote:
| Literally called it "low hanging fruit".
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| PLenz wrote:
| That goal post moved so fast it made a whooshing noise as
| it passed
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| infinitewars wrote:
| > more than 1 plane every minute
|
| Software routinely solves database coordination problems with
| millions of users _per second._
| glitchc wrote:
| Yup, by having backup runways.
| dpark wrote:
| And no fire trucks crossing the runways.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| ....they need to get to fucking fire
|
| ....if they go around kilometer of the runway the fire
| will turn into bigger fire
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Two trucks
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| jjmarr wrote:
| 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_Airpo
| rt
| infinitewars wrote:
| 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.
| matthewkayin wrote:
| 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.
| jrockway wrote:
| 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).
| nradov wrote:
| 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
| mongol wrote:
| True. But to avoid 1 minute unavailability per year
| requires 99.9999 % availability
| verelo wrote:
| Like any scale system, degrade the experience. Use radio
| if the more advanced systems are unavailable?
| johnbarron wrote:
| >> 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.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| with extremely controlled conditions. There is no fog in
| database, nor fallible humans involved, What an ignorant
| response
| yifanl wrote:
| In a digitized environment. We cannot yet simulate the real
| world.
| PieTime wrote:
| This isn't hypothetical, this system just exists in other
| countries. Digital systems can confirm flight instruction
| from ATC with zero radio communication.
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| clint wrote:
| 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%.
| dpark wrote:
| > 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.
| Palomides wrote:
| 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
| dpark wrote:
| That's such a great idea that it already exists and is
| deployed at La Guardia.
|
| https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
| Nition wrote:
| 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.
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| jerbearito wrote:
| > "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?
| jerbearito wrote:
| 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.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| The habit where HN commenters greenfield solutions that
| are slightly worse versions of the ones experts already
| have in place is unmatched.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| 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.
| burntwater wrote:
| My understanding that this scenario is exactly what
| happened here.
| _moof wrote:
| Changing the delivery method doesn't do anything to solve
| the problem of a controller sending an instruction that
| creates a hazard.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _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).
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| felipellrocha wrote:
| Hehehehe, grounded.
| amomchilov wrote:
| That makes digitization even more important, you sold me.
| zenoprax wrote:
| > 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...
| ianburrell wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| 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.
| jorvi wrote:
| HN has recently banned AI written / edited comments. Be
| better.
| glitchc wrote:
| 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).
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _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?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| 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
| matthewkayin wrote:
| 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.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Why do so many jobs have this failure mode? Thinking about
| this should illuminate for you that funding is not the whole
| story.
| jmalicki wrote:
| 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.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| 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.
| jmalicki wrote:
| 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.
| smallerize wrote:
| Well, there was the time Ronald Reagan fired all the ATC
| workers [Edit: I had the reason wrong but I still blame
| Reagan.]
| coredog64 wrote:
| They were already in a union (PATCO) and they were
| striking illegally which lead to their decertification.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| kadoban wrote:
| 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.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Huh. This seems selectively simplified. At least
| according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professio
| nal_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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _striking illegally_
|
| How dare those peons use their economic leverage! That's
| only for the upper class
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| 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.
| magnetowasright wrote:
| 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.
| gretch wrote:
| 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.
| eszed wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Inadequate funding seems like the common factor across the
| vast majority of jobs with these failure modes.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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 :(
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| 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.
| bikelang wrote:
| Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and
| under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the
| boiling?
| fHr wrote:
| As long as we're desperate for a job and we need to finance
| our lifestyle to impress the Johnsons.
| ExtraRoulette wrote:
| It's not even to impress anyone, we need to keep roofs
| over our heads and food in our family's bellies
| jewayne wrote:
| Oh, look whose family has a roof over their head and food
| in their bellies!
|
| We get it, @ExtraRoulette. You're big pimpin'.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Y'all can do with a bit less of that.
|
| Overweight/obesity combined: ~73-75% (nearly 3 in 4
| adults) in the US.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| 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.
| jmcgough wrote:
| I thought it was the avocado toast that was keeping us
| from owning a house.
| ModernMech wrote:
| The point of the frogs boiling metaphor is the frogs in
| fact do not survive.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| We need to combine the crabs in the bucket with the frogs
| in the water and I think we'll have the right metaphor.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| 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.
| adampunk wrote:
| Well, it works with humans just fine.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Except for when it doesn't. It's not clear to me as to
| what you are trying to say.
| fwipsy wrote:
| Yep, in the experiment where they did not, their brains
| had been removed. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/
| archive/2009/07/guest...
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| So not to dissimilar from modern society then.
| Zambyte wrote:
| The point of using the metaphor is that something will
| have to give if we don't course correct.
| y1n0 wrote:
| 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.
| jdlshore wrote:
| Not really the point, but that experiment was debunked.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| yes, and, fortunately -- even the frogs have enough
| awareness they actually jump out before they are boiled.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's true, but there are not that many jobs that have so
| many lives on the line as ATC.
| wilg wrote:
| 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| 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/
| Sabu87 wrote:
| True, few people managing lots of airplanes at the same
| time...
| aeternum wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| aeternum wrote:
| 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.
| thefounder wrote:
| Can't this whole thing being automated and let only
| special/unexpected situations being handled by humans ?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Nowhere has automated ATC because errors look like this.
| alex43578 wrote:
| 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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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/
| alex43578 wrote:
| 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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > 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.
| mememememememo wrote:
| 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
| cj wrote:
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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.
| tempestn wrote:
| 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.
| gretch wrote:
| It should not be automated but it should be heavily
| augmented.
|
| One of the failure modes should not be "guy forgot
| thing".
| cyberax wrote:
| > 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.
| cj wrote:
| Except when the system fails regionally.
| cyberax wrote:
| Then all the takeoffs will be cancelled, immediately
| reducing the workload, and planes will be manually
| landed.
| gosub100 wrote:
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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.
| hajile wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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/
| hajile wrote:
| 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.
| deathanatos wrote:
| 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
| storyinmemo wrote:
| > 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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
| cenamus wrote:
| Nurses also get paid more for night shifts, doesn't mean
| they're 'overpaid'
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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?
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> 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.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| 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".
| bondarchuk wrote:
| 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.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| 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.
| jlawson wrote:
| The controller told the truck to proceed, before telling it
| to stop. That was a serious ATC error.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| zeristor wrote:
| 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.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| 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.
| _moof wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| 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.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _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?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > You can't just throw software at this
|
| Ok, let's not try improving systems, how's that working out?
| nikanj wrote:
| I would not trust my life to a government software project (See
| Phoenix Payroll for a typical case)
| ranger207 wrote:
| 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
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| "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."
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| 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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >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'.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| 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.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at
| this point
|
| How would you do it, then?
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| The Rocket-man-bad-person tried to do this last year and
| essentially lost his company over this.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| cineticdaffodil wrote:
| Avoidable catastrophes indiced as a measurement of cultural
| decline?
| glitchc wrote:
| 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.
| banannaise wrote:
| 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.
| glitchc wrote:
| And yet you chose to respond! Indeed I stand corrected on the
| onsite firehouse, LaGuardia does have one but many airports
| do not.
| nradov wrote:
| Bullshit. Pretty much every airport that handles FAA Part
| 121 flights has dedicated firefighting apparatus and crews.
| davey48016 wrote:
| 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?
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Video of the collision -
| https://x.com/airmainengineer/status/2036116651167384018
| canucker2016 wrote:
| 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/
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| 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.
| hajile wrote:
| 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.
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| 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...
| sfilmeyer wrote:
| This article claims 104 mph, not 24 mph:
| https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/us/timeline-air-canada-
| collis...
| Insanity wrote:
| 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.
| deepspace wrote:
| 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
| Insanity wrote:
| 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 :)
| krunck wrote:
| 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.
| breakingcups wrote:
| Everybody knows better on the internet.
| mianos wrote:
| 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.
| ozten wrote:
| 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.
| graybeardhacker wrote:
| 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.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| This should not be on HN, especially not the front page. Do
| better.
| D-Coder wrote:
| Interesting historical overview:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/03/aviation-fai....
| (Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47494469.)
| consumer451 wrote:
| There is video of the collision now:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyTsnsWHoxc
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