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.

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ultrarunner 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.