That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point. And there's pretty much no way to make ATC's job not stressful, its inherently stressful. Taking out how much of their job is held in the current operators mind versus being 'committed' seems like low hanging fruit 30 years ago.
The whole system's just begging for human error to occur. There's 1700+ runway incursions a year in the US alone, each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed. Like when an accident occurs.
It does, the Runway Status Lights System uses radar to identify when the runway is in use and shows a solid bright red bar at every entrance to the runway. I'm curious what the NTSB has to say about it for this incident. From the charts LGA does have RWSLs. I didn't check NOTAM to see if they were out of service though.
How many runways crossings are there in a year? How much is "1700+" a percentage of that total?
In the end the air traffic system is a highly complex but also a highly reliable system, especially when you compare accident rates.
I am sure the working conditions of ATC staff might be improved - but being both a pilot and a programmer, I know that there is no easy digitalization magic wand for aviation.
1700 incursions a year, and other articles mentioning multiple near misses a week at a single airport [1]. It is safe in practice, likely largely due to the pilots here also being heavily trained and looking for mistakes, but it seems a lot like rolling the dice for a bad day.
>I am sure the working conditions of ATC staff might be improved - but being both a pilot and a programmer, I know that there is no easy digitalization magic wand for aviation.
I didn't say it'd be free. Just hard to believe radio voice communication is the best way to go.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airl...
That's what would need to happen to aviation to "digitize" it.
There are already digitized communications like CPDLC - but it turns out using an unreliable communication technology like VHF - voice isn't so bad in terms of bandwidth. And aviation has standardized protocols for voice communication making sure that everybody is on the same page.
Money isn't the only reason it's so old. The coordination problems are huge. https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/24/us_air_traffic_contro...
A lot of wild conspiracy theories being thrown around in answer to this question.
All these people arguing back and forth over black people really solidifies my belief that as Americans, we have an unhealthy fixation with blacks. And the allusions to Trump cuts, to me, implies an almost equally unhealthy fixation with Trump.
I'm a mathematician by training. So let me outline my, really quite simple, thinking on the matter.
There are 13000 air traffic controllers in the US. Even after 1500 left so far under Trump. That's about 260 per state. And even then, only if every state were allocated ATC personnel equally. Which they aren't.
But,
if only for the purposes of looking at the numbers in a fashion as friendly as possible to the "blacks are responsible for Trump, climate change, the surfside condo collapse, any aviation accident, the failure of the Texas power grid, and the second shooter on the grassy knoll"-crowd, we'll go ahead and assume that ATC are allocated equally among the states.
So we'll say the entire state of New York has only 260 controllers at its disposal.
Now we come to the issue with black conspiracies or Trump cuts being responsible for a lack of staff in this case. That issue being that there are only 18 commercial airports in the entire state of New York.
Can anyone stop thinking about black people or Trump long enough to see where I'm going with this?
We'd better actually look under the hood and find out why one guy was on duty when we know full well there are hundreds of ATC available? What were the blocking conditions that idled the rest of the ATC personnel?
Not interested in conspiracy theories. I mean what were the actual dispositions of those assets.
In short people, spare me the "it's a black american conspiracy" nonsense. I also find myself with little interest in the "Trump policies" excuses. This is serious business. There will be loss of life if we fail to properly address these issues in the future.
It's really important that we try, to the extent that it's possible, to keep the political nonsense out of investigations of aviation incidents.
Literally the black ATC union wrote an impossible test that FAA used and then gave the answers to black people taking it.
Lots of people have written about it, here’s a few:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
https://simpleflying.com/faa-air-traffic-controller-applican...
https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/premium-the-faas-bizarr...
https://www.newsweek.com/faa-reject-air-traffic-controllers-...
"The lawsuit doesn’t allege incompetent controllers were hired instead of CTI graduates. Instead, it states that the CTI graduates weren’t given the opportunity to demonstrate their competency."
It sounds like they hired different people, rather than fewer.
Your comment presuming it was at best neutral, and any likely change was for the worse is exactly what racism looks like.
All the Newsweek article says is that a lawsuit was filed. It doesn’t support GP’s claim that the FAA made “an impossible test, and gave black people the answers.” A lawsuit isn’t evidence of wrongdoing; it’s only evidence of an accusation of wrongdoing.
I remember late last year, couple of months ago, US ATC controllers were without pay but forced to work anyways (similar to TSA I suppose, although I don't think they were forced, but volunteered to work without salary), is that still the situation? Couldn't find any updates about that the situation been resolved, nor any updates that it's ongoing, if so though it feels like it'd be related to the amount of available controllers.
But no, AIUI only things that were somehow deemed part of "Homeland Security" are frozen, the TSA are part of Homeland Security but the ATC are under the FAA. So this particular partial government funding lapse wasn't causal, at least directly.
- Another plane was out of position, grabbing some attention of the controller
- Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
- The colliding plane didn't have "explicit" landing clearance, but a "follow previous plane and land the same way unless told otherwise" implicit landing clearance. In Europe, planes need an explicit landing clearance, the act of granting it may have brought attention to the runway contention. US implicit system (arguably) is a bit more efficient, debate will now be is it worth it (pilots are now required to read back instructions because of past blood... will this result in same thing?)
- This was around midnight and apparently a little foggy, making visual contacts harder
Remember folks, disasters like this are rarely caused by a single factor. NTSB reports are excellent post-mortems that look at all contributing factors and analyze how they compounded into failure. Be human here.
"Jazz 646, number 2, cleared to land 4."
Sharp contrast with Europeans
Still, I'm always hesitant to cross an active runway.
ATC audio
make a mistake, recognize it, and then have to continue on your job, knowing you likely just killed people, because if you don't others will die.
The weight of some jobs is immense, and our civilization relies upon workers to shoulder the burden everyday.
Honestly, you can generally just blame Reagan for about anything. A presidency about weaking labor, strengthening Iran, and ballooning the deficit is uh never going to leave good traces.
See this article from 2017: https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2017/06/house-democrats-in...
Also, did the pilots die in the collision or in some sort of aftermath? The cockpit looks absolutely smashed.