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

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

▲ FL410 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

▲ adgjlsfhk1 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>This isn't one guy's fault.

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

▲ jordanb 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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 outdated equipment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

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

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

▲ voxic11 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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

originally passed as

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

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

	▲	adgjlsfhk1 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They were striking for less outdated tools, improving staffing levels, and other safety improvements. The solution was to give them the things they wanted.

▲ sonar_un 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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

	▲	antonymoose an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I’m not saying he didn’t ignore a real problem - but it’s been 45 years since the 1981 airline strike. Surely the blame ought to be spread around our incompetent Federal government.

▲ coryrc 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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

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

	▲	achierius 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> It should also be their incentive You can't just proclaim what incentives should be. We do have a mechanism for changing the incentives of management though: it's called unions.

▲ jen20 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲

_ph_ 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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

	▲	jen20 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The is a good idea, but once they are broken, you should at least try to fix them, or bear some of the blame for not having tried.

▲ newsclues 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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

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

	▲	wsbetter 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It might sound simple, but won't tunnels lower the strength of the runways (I presume that's where you would put them)? Strengthening that would create an expensive solution to a basic communication problem. That's like saying instead of 4 way stops, we elevate the two intersecting roads to avoid collision, just because someone may have ran the stop sign. Also, ground vehicles typically need to be on the ground for a reason. Why seperate them?

▲ busterarm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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

▲

anonymars 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Firing them all broke the pipeline

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

	▲	busterarm 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When I don't show up to work I expect to get fired and not rehired too.

▲ MisterTea 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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

▲

m_fayer 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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

	▲	amiga386 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The perfect wake up call before this perfect wake up call was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Potomac_River_mid-air_col... Imagine how good the next wake up call will be! See also Preemptive Memorial Honors Future Victims Of Imminent Dam Disaster: https://theonion.com/preemptive-memorial-honors-future-victi...
	▲	MisterTea 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's not minimizing, it's galvanizing. 100% A wake up call. I don't fly much but I was bothered by the earlier ATC stories and now I don't feel safe at all.

▲ amiga386 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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

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

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

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

- Regan broke the union in the 1980s

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

▲ 2c0m 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	irishcoffee 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		31. If you had started 2 years ago you should have been fine.

▲ mikpanko 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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

▲ journal 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲ frenchtoast8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From the article:

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

▲ itopaloglu83 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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

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

▲ kevmo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The US intentionally created the ATC shortage. From Wikipedia:

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

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

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

▲ amelius 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	blitzar 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You are absolulety right, the blockchain could have prevented this accident
	▲	dehrmann 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You don't need modern AI; you can build a system that does voice recognition, models the airport and airspace, and applies looks for violations. Actually, you might be able to try this. Live ATC and radar is available.