In general, I can. In LaGuardia? Aside from right after 9/11 and during COVID-19 when almost all commercial travel stopped, I cannot.

I don't think people saying this stuff quite understand how busy LGA is even at night. I'd even go as far as to say that three minimum on duty with two in the tower at all times (for a ground/air split), would be the bare minimum for any hour or situation at LGA.

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

At one of the nation's busiest airports? Where there are two intersecting runways, both potentially with departing and arriving aircraft? Nope.

But, sure, a single-runway regional airport can probably get by with a single controller.

An obvious issue is going to be that while it's supposed to be a lower-traffic time, if you've had delays cascading down the day - it may not be in reality. If the staffing doesn't adjust for delays shifting the time of flights, it would probably often leave you with an overworked controller.

Looking at the normal schedules - if all is on schedule there'd be no departures in the 23:00 hour but you'd still have the arrivals side running pretty heavily. However, once you factor in things not being on schedule, as they evidently were not on that night, you get:

----------

The 15min before the accident had 14 flight operations (per Juan Browne/blancolirio going through the ADSB playback). And that's in marginal weather and at night, which makes things more complicated.

That is 75% of the official maximum capacity of the airport - during the main part of the day where there's government-imposed caps on flights, it's capped at 74 operations per hour or about 18.5 per 15min.

As such, it seems apparent that you would need just as much staffing (or at least 75% as much) at that time to safely handle the traffic volume that was occurring that night as you did in the main part of the day.

Unless the normal staffing here was just 2 people, it seems clear that 1 is inadequate.

"...routinely considered feasible..."

What we are seeing here is the normalization of deviance.

I believe other areas can assist when something like that happens.

I don’t have time to check flight logs but I personally landed at LGA coming from MDW on Sunday. And I also know people who got diverted within the hour coming back to LGA that night. 30-40 minutes doesn’t seem accurate. That aside, if you’ve ever done operational staffing, you’d know that you should probably have at least one redundancy. When there is any chance of emergency or two events happening simultaneously, you should have more than one person.

One last meta point. We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and the highest air travel prices (some part is a function of longer distances I know). We should expect that we have ample coverage, if not over-coverage, at all times for one of our major metropolitan airports. Pay them.

12am-5am is very quiet, at about 1 per hour. But the accident happened during the 10pm-12am time slot, which is not as busy as other times of day, but can still have workload spikes as evidenced by this situation.

ATC should never work alone at any of the "Core 30" airports. https://www.aspm.faa.gov/aspmhelp/index/Core_30.html

In this case there were two arrivals within 4 minutes of each other and two departures, in addition to the emergency plane that had just aborted takeoff.

What is the contingency/continuity plan if the single controller becomes incapacitated while on duty with no warning to pilots?

> I still haven't seen evidence that they were running understaffed at that moment.

I think the disagreement you see is based on the definition of what "understaffed" means. Having one ATC to do ground and air control simultaneously seems like an under-staffing situation to begin with, regardless of whether it's a common practice.

SPOF still applies here. You don't need evidence of fatigue or anything. You have only 1 of anything, you run the risk of ending up having nothing.