The current US President is the last person we should listen to when it comes to deciding anything important.

No. Safety investigation agencies deliberately aren't regulators. The NTSB may decide that their recommendation is that every air passenger should be carrying a melon, and that results in a press release, a letter to the FAA saying that's what they recommend, that's all.

Deciding to change policies to effect the recommendation isn't their role. That's why you will so often see a safety investigatory body repeatedly recommend the same thing. The UK's RAIB (which is for Rail investigations) for example will often call out why a fatal accident they've investigated wouldn't have happened if the regulator had implemented some prior recommendation, either one they're slow walking or have rejected.

The investigators don't need to care about other factors. Are melons too expensive? Not their problem. Only unfriendly countries grow melons? Not their problem. They only need to care about recommending things that would prevent future harm which is their purpose.

"Liability" isn't really how we try to see things in aviation. While it's true that it's ultimately considered the responsibility of the truck/plane to visually confirm that crossing the runway is safe, refuse unsafe commands from ATC, and comply to the best of their ability when ATC says "stop" at the last second, we can't stop our analysis there if we want to prevent this from happening in the future, because unless things change someone will make this mistake again in the future. Telling people not to make mistakes isn't going to help at all; it's obvious, and no one wants to cause an accident. The error is just the last step in the process that led to the collision.

The controller was talking to Frontier plane when he first said stop, then said stopstopTruck1stopstopstop and it would be easy for there to be a gap in processing for the driver of truck 1 because the verbiage all flowed in the same stanza that was started when addressing the Frontier flight.

> Is it common now to have solo operators running control towers?

At Class D airports it’s always been the norm. But KLGA is Class B.

Truck was on a different frequency from the aircraft so they couldn’t even hear each others’ clearances.

Also first time ATC told the truck to stop it wasn’t too clear who the message was addressed to. It’s a bit hard to hear “Truck1” there, not clear who he wants to stop. The second time, one can argue by the time “stop” command was heard it might have been better to gun the engine. As the truck sort of slowed down in the middle of the runway.

> this seems to be exacerbated by government cuts

What government cuts? 2025 FAA air traffic budget was up around 7% from 2025

https://enotrans.org/article/senate-bill-oks-27-billion-faa-...

In both cases, the controller's fate was grim. Peter Nielsen (Überlingen) was murdered by a relative of a crash victim. Robin Lee Wascher (LA), whose own parents had died in an earlier air crash, was crucified in the media and never worked as a controller again.

Both precedents are applicable, because the Laguardia controller is also going to be savaged.

Admiral Cloudberg has a great writeup about this. I instantly thought of LA when I saw the headlines about the LaGuardia collision.

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c...

I wonder if they thought that since they were responding to an emergency, and they were given clearance to cross by ATC, that that would override normal procedures. Kind of like how emergency vehicles cross a red light all the time when responding to an emergency.

The REILs are part of ARFF training. Pilot training on it is also clear. The system is automated. It plots the direction and speed of anything approaching the runway and predicts a conflict. If the REILs are red it is HIGHLY likely there is a conflict that is missed by human error and you should not proceed without confirming. Don't just confirm cleared to cross, explicitly tell the controller "XYZ tower we have red runway entrance lights. Please confirm runway XX is clear".

The system is smart enough that if you get red bars to cross for an airplane departing once it passes your position the red clears because it knows the airplane is already past you. It is not dumb - it was deliberately designed to minimize false positives so everyone would trust it otherwise they might ignore it when it really counts. (AFAIK it very accurate in fact so the firetrucks weren't crossing because they distrusted the red lights).

This is just like all aviation incidents and indeed most incidents of any kind: the holes in the swiss cheese lined up.

The emergency aircraft couldn't find a free gate, creating a massive distraction for ATC, airport, et al. This is probably the primary domino that started the sequence. Had a gate been free this incident would not have happened. One big hole lined up.

Normally the aircraft would visually see the truck or the truck would visually see the airplane. But it was dark and rainy. Another hole lined up.

Everyone involved was rushing because noise abatement requires the airport to close at a certain hour. Thus everyone wanted to take-off or land before that shutdown. Another hole.

Normally the controller wouldn't issue the clearance to cross or their supervisor monitoring behind them would notice the error and override. But the controller and/or supervisor were distracted by the emergency. Another hole lined up.

The controller realized the error and issued a stop command but the fire truck proceeded anyway; they may or may not have heard the transmission. Another hole lined up.

Then someone else decided to jump on frequency during this busy time (we don't know who just yet) which may have prevented the controller's stop and/or go-around commands from being heard (another hole lined up).

The ARFF crew did not obey the REILs, accepting the clearance. Perhaps they thought the red lights were due to aircraft on short final and they still had time to cross? Perhaps it was some other misunderstanding of how that system works. Another hole lines up.

And the Air Canada jet was not paying attention to the chaos on frequency. There's a reason runway crossings are typically done on tower frequency: so aircraft can hear what is going on. But it was late at night and their brains probably didn't process what was happening. Or they were too close to touching down to have the bandwidth. Another hole lined up.

It certainly didn't help.[1]

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-doges-cutbacks-at-the-...

Yes, but the problems have been driven by the relentless deregulation of critical industries and infrastructure primarily driven by a specific political bloc. In the next US election, we should vote for candidates that promise systemic change and government overhaul, not further deregulation and handouts to corporations.

They got markedly worse after 2024. No need to minimize the damage the current administration is doing to the institutions of the country.

Mostly due to blind faith in austerity and the market, by certain groups.

You had two options and one was clearly far worse than the other. This nuanced-excuse-making and “the democrats also occasionally do things I don’t like” is lazy. Take responsibility for letting the mob take over - even if it was just by inaction.

Very doubtful whatever agency you can conjour up as an excuse will be more impactful than the country wide changed induced by the overall administration

Put the costs on the carriers, not hand the job over to them.

Couldn’t we just… wait to see what FAA says before coming up with our own (entirely speculative) theories?

I'd pay to watch someone say this in a court of law...

If a member of this administration said he wasn’t working alone, that’s solid evidence he was.

The evidence that he was overworked seems pretty damned obvious. He forgot about an entire airplane and put a fire truck in its path. The evidence of overwork is strewn all around LGA.

"Staffing shortage" doesn't mean "you can fit more people in the tower."

You can't think of any scenario having one controller makes sense?

Is he? I can see the number of hours worked as evidence of a shortage, but prima facie it is not obvious that a single controller handling both ground and air is evidence of a 'shortage' if it is routinely considered feasible in the industry. It could just be an efficiency choice for low-traffic times. Based on some googling since I'm not an expert it seems this is called 'position combining' in the US and is pretty routine across the world. Therefore, if this is a problem the primary cause cannot be US policy because non-US airports also do this thing.

Here it's being done at SFO or so it seems: https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?FileExtension=...

While searching I did find this other document where a GC (LC appears to be Local Control for local air traffic and GC is ground control) controller complains about combining due to short-staffing https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=19837915&Fi...

Well, it'll be an interesting report from the NTSB at least.

It seems like a critical enough role that you probably want two people there in case one has a medical emergency anyway. Even if it's not that busy.

Planes landing at a rate of one every 30-40 minutes isn't exactly "overworked."

Maybe. Lets see what the NTSB recommendations say.

However despite the downvotes I still haven't seen evidence that they were running understaffed at that moment.

What I do know is that the developing emergency on the tarmac due to an apparently hazardous smell in another plane is likely the cause of the confusion that led to this incident. That's a trigger that could have been exacerbated by fatigue but we don't have any evidence of that yet.

There are other people there, but the person on the radio is doing both.

"Funny" enough if this controller had had a medical emergency (or just bad sushi) and been off the radios, this wouldn't have happened because the fire truck would not have received clearance to cross the runway and wouldn't have. Or at least would have crossed like the airport was uncontrolled, been much more careful and announced itself, and likely have seen the landing aircraft.

There are millions of people who are self employed in an industry where they could be maimed or killed if they screw up who manage to make it to retirement.

I think the better question is how you get a system in which people are only responsible for any one facet to get the same performance out of people that a painter can get out of himself when he's setting up his own ladder that he personally has to climb on.