New York State is large. It has lots of airports [0] - although not all of those are towered, you're still dividing that 260 down by quite a lot. And I don't believe it's standard practice to fly some dude in Buffalo down to NYC to cover a shift. There's a huge staffing problem in ATC right now.

That staffing problem mostly comes down to it being demanding work that's poorly compensated for the amount of skill and education and stress involved; there are high hiring standards, you can't work past 56, and you can't even get started if you're past 31. If you're interested in aviation, you can make far more money as a pilot and it's a much more pleasant job; why would anyone become an ATC?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_New_York_(...

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bilbo0s 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>you're still dividing that 260 down by quite a lot

No you're not.

In the state of New York, the most it could possibly be divided down is by 32.

And that only in the case that ATC are distributed to towered facilities equally whether commercial or simple public-use. Which we both know they are not.

And I'll do you a really big favor and not even mention the fact that there are wayyy more than 260 ATC in New York state. Again, I was just being friendly to your view. I strongly suspect that you are also aware that there are well over 1000.

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wk_end 3 hours ago | parent [-]

260/32 is around 8. "A lot" is subjective but I think that fits the bill?

LGA is open 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Of course this is an extreme over-simplification, but if LGA only had eight ATC at their disposal total it's easy to see - or at least, much easier to see than if your working number is 260 - how they might have only one guy available to work Tower/Ground on a night shift. Please bear in mind that there's more to ATC in an airspace like NYC's than just Tower/Ground, and that ATC need regular breaks. Maybe they had two people but no redundancy, so one guy was covering both tasks during a break?

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bilbo0s 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>so one guy was covering both tasks during a break

Which is exactly the practice that needs to stop.

You and I both know there are far more than 8 ATC controllers that work LGA. Please don't try to assert that there was no way to even have a relief available. (As appears to be the case in this instance.)

Whatever caused the lack of availability that night needs to be urgently addressed. Please don't try to tell me we would have needed to train more ATC controllers to provide even a single relief at that tower last night. We both know how many ATC work LGA so we both know that's not true.

	▲	wk_end 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As it's not SOP to have one guy working both tower and ground at an airport the size of LGA, I'm going to assert that the most likely scenario is that, yes, there was no way to even have a relief available. What caused the lack of availability is the well-documented understaffing. Everyone in aviation knows that ATC is understaffed right now, and the reasons for the understaffing are well-understood. To come in and instead say, "well, I'm a mathematician, I'm going to make some simplifying assumptions - the only simplifying assumptions permitted - and do some basic arithmetic to show that there were hundreds of controllers available, clearly the guys responsible for ATC at LaGuardia don't know as much about running an airport safely as me" is beyond silly.