The margins are thin enough that certain planes will sometimes have people in the back get off first, before the people on the front, to avoid tipping onto the tail like this.
(Though some of the major damage may have happened while deplaning the passengers)
edit: Looking into this a bit more it looks like the plane came to a stop around crossing E while the emergency vehicle was crossing at D(based on ATC recordings). Using the following map as reference[2], the 58kts point was around E, while the previous recorded point which was just before D was 114kts.
[1] https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/ac8646#3ede6c39
[2] https://www.flightaware.com/resources/airport/LGA/APD/AIRPOR...
Per the ADSBx track the plane was at 101kts (115 mph / 185kph) just before crossing taxiway D, which would be where it hit the firetruck. It still had enough energy afterwards to reach taxiway E, 600ft away.
A plane is basically a flimsy tube. A firetruck is a solid brick comparatively. The plane out weighs the fire truck by a lot and out speeds it by a lot. So yeah, destroying the whole front of the plane to punt the truck it sounds about right for a 25 on 5 or 35 on 10/15 type rear ending to me. Flipping doesn't really sound that unreasonable considering that the plane made contact with the top of the truck (just by virtue of comparative height) and contact may not have been straight on. Even if it left the pavement on it's wheels airport firefighters aren't exactly who I'd bet on (they're middle of the pack) to keep the truck on it's wheels if they got surprise kicked off the road especially if there's an embankment involved.
An Oshkosh 1500 4x4 is 62000 lbs GVWR (wiki says kerb weight but it’s incorrect).
The plane was landing and the truck was heading to an intervention, so they were likely close to empty and to GVWR respectively.
And again, 25mph is the final ground speed, after the plane punted the truck and kept on going for 600ft.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HEFF17eaYAA_sgq?format=jpg
I can’t tell what’s the truck and what’s the remains of the plane in this pic.
Another wider angle:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HEFDcS4bwAA8uu7?format=png&name=...
There’s no way this scene happens from a plane colliding with a truck at 24mph.
The back of a firetruck is not a working implement like a dump truck is nor is it sufficiently strong for mounting a crane or man bucket like utility bodies often are It's a bunch of sheetmetal boxes to hold stuff and cover stuff and there's a water tank back there somewhere. In the middle down low some pumps are buried. Basically don't think of it as being any more structural than a box truck body because it's not. All that stuff got shredded, obviously, since they're only really meant to bear their own weight and were subject to all the truck tossing forces here. Beyond that the truck is in pretty good shape. It's not uncommon for a good "off the highway and into the ditch" crash to rip tandems off, twist frames, etc. None of that has happened here. The plane is pretty rough, but that's expected. They are 100% tin cans. Ground equipment moving at idle speeds will absolutely shred them before the operator even feels resistance. A goose hit square on the leading edge of a small jet's wing will put a massive dent in (and apply red paint, lol).
24 sounds about right for a closing speed for plane onto truck. Whatever the baseline speed of the truck was cannot have been that high or the truck would be absolutely shredded from the barrel roll and as it stand the cab is barely pushed in.
The last recorded ground speed data of 24mph also shows a wildly different heading (going from 30deg ish to 170ish). So it probably happened after the collision and was part of its deceleration. As far as I know, the truck would have been crossing the runway so the effective speed perpendicular to the plane would be zero except for directional shear I guess.
Even without looking up the very public ADS-B data, you are ignoring the fact that ARFF trucks are very much not the same as the average firefighting truck as well as the fact that the CRJ-900 was in the middle of its landing roll (which alone would have been clue enough that it was obviously moving much faster than 24mph).
Wouldn't final ground speed be zero?
I think you'd be surprised. The cab is quite solid because it has to conform to certain vehicle design and safety criteria (at least here in Europe).
The rest of it is made of fairly squashy aluminium box section with panels TIG welded on. There's not a lot left if one of them gets rolled, for example.
People into boats need to understand this. Even a boat that travels no more than 4mph can crush you easily. This is why you never get on to moving boat from the front. Many people have made a mistake because speed is not high.
Speed, kinetic energy and acceleration are all interrelated and at the end of the day it's all forces (to some extent) and no amount of hand wringing commentary is going to replace genuine understanding of them.
The speed was much higher per sibling comment, but also remember that kinetic energy also involves mass (planes are heavy) and the square of the velocity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy
The latter is why (e.g.) going 100 units/hour has twice the KE of going 70 units/hour in a car.
> Captain and first officer are reported to have died in the accident, two fire fighters on board of the truck received serious injuries, 13 passengers received injuries.
Nowhere else in the world you would hear such statements. Boeings simply disappeared from Europe, those few that were here before. I am sure they are still used somewhere but I haven't flown any in past 7-8 years. Heck, I haven't seen any in South east Asia neither (but that may be due to luck).
I check this with all bookings, no way I am flying that piece of shit if I can anyhow avoid that, not alone and quadruple that with family.
That is just simply false. There are many boeings flying in europe. Just by randomly clicking around on flightradar24 I found multiple right now in the air.
Grok timed out but here is perplexity
Per 100 million miles traveled
Car driving: ~0.57 deaths per 100 million miles (recent U.S. data).
Commercial air travel: ~0.003 deaths per 100 million miles.
umm u should never drive again. in fact never leave your apartment/house.
You're going to die of heart disease caused by your poor diet.
You should never eat again. No, wait, stop, I mean...
https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/certalerts/part_...
I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
I highly doubt that any system would intentionally give ground vehicles of any kind special treatment on an active runway.
Us lot have more people doing SRE ensuring p99 10ms for something frankly way less important. It is a nuts world.
The only negative I can think of is that it will generally involve accepting and responding to clearances on short final. I think adding more tasks to that critical stage of flight probably increases danger a little. Especially for low time student pilots like myself. That's particularly relevant in the U.S. because we have a higher percentage of student and private pilots than most of the world.
Overall, though, I'm fully convinced this would be safer.
They do at CYYZ (Toronto Pearson):
* https://www.flightradar24.com/43.68,-79.63/13 (zoomed in)
* https://www.flightradar24.com/airport/yyz
Also at CYUL (Montreal Trudeau) and CYVR (Vancouver International).
Truck declared it was crossing. ATC told it to stop. Truck didn't stop.
This wasn't a communication issue.
Timestamps from the video:
2:46 Truck requests crossing
2:51 ATC allows it to cross
2:53 Truck confirms
2:58 ATC: "Frontier 4195 stop there please"
3:02 ATC: "stop stop stop stop truck one stop stop stop"
3:15 ATC: "tower, truck one, stop, ..."
Crash probably a couple seconds later, wouldn't rely on the video for the exact timing.
So it seems that ATC made an error by allowing the truck to cross, and then the order to stop wasn't communicated clearly enough. I wouldn't place much blame on the truck.
Edit: Looking at some other videos with that audio, I'm also not sure if the video I linked represents the time between communications correctly, transmission at 3:15 may have been right after the one at 3:02. Anyway, the best thing is to wait for the investigation.
This is a good overview so far:
Everyone can write a comment on Reddit / make a podcast / video / whatever claiming whatever they want. Unless you already know and trust them (which requires you to be able to cross-check their information), it's potentially as useful as a random LLM hallucination. Could be brilliantly spot on, or could be completely nonsense. No way of knowing unless you already know enough. (Because even cross-checking won't necessarily save you, if you cross-check multiple bullshit sources).
Media with standards (like the BBC, Guardian, Liberation, etc.) will do their best to report truthfully (even if sometimes with some bias), and will fix their mistakes if they're caught later on or the story evolves. Independent media checking organisations have shown time and time again that there is trustworthy media, you just need to know which it is, and always take a pinch of salt. It's wild to me that people will just dismiss rags such as Fox News and relatively quality media like Guardian in the same breath.
The NYT is biased, but it’s still basically the most official newspaper of the American ruling class.
You should provide sources for a claim like that. For example, what in the BBC article is wrong?
> Video footage on social media showed the aircraft, which is operated by Air Canada's regional partner Jazz aviation, coming to a rest with its nose upturned.
This just isn’t true. There’s no video of the plane coming to a rest with its nose upturned (which implies motion). The upturned nose happened only after passengers deplaned and the balance shifted.
> It had slowed to about 24mph when it collided with a vehicle from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.
This is the next part that will change. Just because some of the last broadcast data said 24mph doesn’t mean that’s the speed it was when it collided with the truck. The truck is on its side and those passengers are in hospital. The pilots are dead. The plane sustained enough structural damage to have the entire nose collapse. If the sentence is based on that broadcast data, SAY THAT instead of printing it as fact.
And with all the quotes from social media posts from key groups, link to them instead of just vaguely quoting.
EDIT:
As expected, they got rid of the above paragraph claiming the speed. It now says:
“The plane was arriving from Montreal and had landed, before colliding with the vehicle from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.”
With a fast-changing news story where vague/incomplete/conflicting details emerge in the first few hours it's not unreasonable for the first few revisions to be like that, and eventually gets fixed hours or a day later.
ATC audio is https://archive.liveatc.net/klga/KLGA-Twr-Mar-23-2026-0330Z....
The clearance for AC8646 to land on runway 4 is given in a sequence starting at 4:58. "Vehicle needs to cross the runway" at 6:43. Truck 1 and company asks for clearance to cross 4 at 6:53. Clearance is granted at 7:00. Then ATC asks both a Frontier and Truck 1 to stop, voice is hurried and it's confusing.
CNN, CNBC, NYPost, Guardian all had stories up quickly, or around an hour. There are others too.
UPDATED:
Down-votes happen but disappointing since I'm stating facts. Heres some backup:
The user haunter said media started reporting around ~4 AM EST (based on timestamps).
The accident happened at 11:40 PM EST. Story publish times across a sample of various legacy/mainstream media orgs:
CNN - 12:47 AM
NYPost - 12:47 AM
The Guardian - 12:50 AM
Associated Press (AP) - 1:31 AM
Fox News - 1:47 AM
Newsweek - 2:24 AM
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1s16x61/comment/o...
How would the ICE thing cause more ground traffic collisions. Are you thinking ATC controllers are illegal immigrants and they’re going to run away during their shift? I just don’t see a connection there…
Still, I'm always hesitant to cross an active runway.
I can almost guarantee you the airplane was visible from taxiway D.
Source: Mentour Pilot. https://www.youtube.com/live/Bb4CcoK0KLM
The truck asks permission to cross. It is given. The truck declares it is going to cross, but the ATC replies "just stop there please".
Also, those runway entry lights look red to me. If so, that should have been a HUGE warning sign to the driver.
Edit:- It's Atlanta.
The airspace that combines JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark, is the busiest airspace in the US.
Lots of pilots here have been complaining for years about how the US controllers are so much better, they can handle much more traffic, etc.
> why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?
We're currently doing school visits for our kid, in a low-performing school district, and the teachers and administrators we've met have been impressive. I've worked in education, and visited a lot of schools in another professional capacity, so I know the questions to ask, and things to look for. I have no illusions about there being absolutely terrible teachers out there (and I'll tell you some horror stories, if you'd like), and doubtless any (hypothetical) bad teachers at those schools are being kept away from prospective parents, but your statement is hyperbolic in the extreme. The problems in the US school system are legion, but "every single teacher is crap" is not remotely true.
I was at school for 12 years.
There were two good teachers.
The rest of them, and all the staff at those four schools, are hopefully spending the rest of eternity burning in hell.
Which means either the compensation is insufficient to attract and retain the necessary number of qualified individuals, or the FAA lacks the resources to train an appropriate number of qualified individuals. Either way, it's about money.
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".
That would have given the jet a chance to hear the truck cleared to cross the runway they were landing on.
The audio sounds unsure when giving the clearance - but possibly hindsight ears at work.
The obvious problem is what happens when operations become abnormal. ATC shouldn't be staffed for normal operations, because then abnormal operations lead to catastrophe. Welcome to last night: the weather is bad, which causes a plane to abort two takeoffs, which causes that plane to need emergency services. This increases the controller's workload beyond his capacity, so he accidentally clears the emergency vehicle to cross in front of a landing airplane, and they can't see the airplane because the weather is bad, so they follow the instruction and promptly get hit with an airplane.
When some bad weather can be the difference between "this is fine, one controller can handle it" and two dead pilots, you need to be staffed for bad weather.
Should they be combined at LGA when both (crossing) runways are in use, and there's an incident on the field? (The fire trucks were on their way to investigate a smell on the flight deck of another airplane that had to abort takeoff twice.)
I'd say hell no.
The emergency vehicle was told to stop and did not. Even a dozen ATC wouldn't have helped in that case.
Watch the video.
Other trucks slow down, but truck 1 does not even try to slow down. I'd also argue that driving so quickly that you cannot maintain control is its own problem. Getting to an emergency 20 seconds later almost never matters as much as arriving safely.
Understaffing is absolutely a factor. Had tower and ground not been combined, the erroneous clearance probably wouldn't have been issued.
The ARFF truck not complying with the stop instruction is absolutely a factor. Had they heard and complied, the accident wouldn't have happened.
And there are likely additional factors that will come out in the investigation.
I recommend reading some final aviation accident reports from the NTSB to learn more about how these investigations proceed and what kinds of conclusions and recommendations they include.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/nyregion/faa-air-traffic-...
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.
So why the fuck would any talented individual choose to go work for the "Get an example made out of you" department, on top of the horrific stress of the actual job!?
The idea of a union that "isn't allowed" to strike is a joke. Next will be a union that has a max membership of 1!
It's a mess.
Sharp contrast with Europeans
From pilot friends, in best case I would say a big “depends” in some countries are very unprofessional, in others very professional (anyway total unfair generalization). There were already accidents because of that, for example because the twr communicated with locals in non english, so not everybody was at the same page.
- 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."
The controller said “truck 1 stop” that is not ambiguous.
"stop stop stop, truck 1 stop stop stop" I mean maybe it was ambiguous for half a second but he pretty quickly said "truck 1 stop". I guess we'll have to wait for the sync up to see if it was too late to stop by then
Let's get the important parts out of the way first: We in charge have taken care of optics, with regard to our offices.
Oh, and we're going to contact families eventually.
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.
Things are happening to the federal workforce right now that aren't even legal in the private sector.
But sure, yeah you can seek redress through the courts.
And this admin doesn't simply stop an initiative when courts block them, they find a new "creative interpretation" to do the same thing, and carry on for however long it takes the next trial to happen.
Every time i see an anti-union article, its usually about unions that do good union things...
But noone ever complains about the police union. It's always the public goods people like ATC or teachers.
This is not obvious on its face, but also, paying taxes is not my only concern wrt the civil society in which I live.
Maybe this is the one evidence-driven case where you can be open minded about the value of a public employee union?
Of course public employee unions have conflicting interests with taxpayers in general. But that's not a bad thing, unless you subscribe to the peabrained 'everyone is ripping us off mentality' of some professional whiners and presidents. There is this image deliberately created of federal government employees who show up for work and collect a huge check for doing nothing except resting their feet on the desk all day, but I don't see any basis for believing this.
In reality, it makes a lot of sense for government employees to communicate information upward about safety and working conditions, not least because managers (many of whom are political appointees) have their own career interests and those too are not always aligned with taxpayers. It's weird to me that people demonize the bottom tier employees while turning a blind eye to the economic incentives for the managerial and secretarial class in government. Look at the recently departed secretary of Homeland Security, who racked up hundreds of millions of questionable expenses.
I’d love to see ATC funded by usage fees (some kind of “landing toll”) instead of the government (with some kind of licensing / oversight - like how pilots and pilot licensing works). The current system clearly is not working.
The government is a great tool to regulate but not execute.
If the regulations are crazy let the people who have to implement them strike.
Ridiculous to see people acting like LLMs are a silver bullet for every problem without putting any thought into what that would actually look like.
See this article from 2017: https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2017/06/house-democrats-in...
"”The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican,” - Barack Obama [0]
[0] https://thehill.com/policy/finance/137156-obama-says-hed-be-...
Obama was a very moderate Democrat for his time. If you go back in time a moderate Democrat and Republican were similar because the "center" was more reasonable. Now the "center" is just people that are ashamed that they vote Republican.
But all private businesses have the same responsibilities and capabilities and therefore can be lumped together as one entity? The asymmetry in how you're critiquing the way this is discussed ends up revealing your bias.
Our civilization? Nah. Just that one shithole country. Greatest country in the world and they schedule a single guy to work both tower and ground frequencies at a major airport, it's almost like they're asking for this shit to happen.
And before anyone mentions understaffing, this literally one of the plethora of problems that the rest of the world figured out while the U.S. continues to act special.
Also, did the pilots die in the collision or in some sort of aftermath? The cockpit looks absolutely smashed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...
The 2025 crash near DCA, of course, absolutely spiked the number of recent commercial aviation deaths, but we haven't had any other aviation tragedies of that magnitude in more than a decade.
This can be a preventable tragedy without there needing to be a conspiracy behind it.
Your link is global not American which wouldn’t really show the effect if it was a change in US policy. But Googling you’re right, the premise is wrong.
Having grade-separate crossings for vehicles might, but that introduces new issues (plane skidding off runway could hit the incline and break up).
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.
In the audio released by the BBC, the fire truck DID get permission from the tower to cross something, I can't tell if it was the runway in question. However, to cross the red runway lights if lit, you normally need that spelled out too something like "truck one, cross four delta, cross red lights". This did not happen on the BBC audio, which could mean one of many things.
The guy was alone operating 2 frequencies, had an emergency of another aircraft going on… is not so easy as many commenters from the armchair are insinuating
When cleared across a runway I'm still going to be looking in all directions, and proceed as fast as I can. I also look both ways at railway crossings even if the guards are up and silent.
I also wonder if you're down to a "one controller" scenario if it would be better for there to be once frequency, not a ground/air split.
(See my other comment below if you're tempted to say something about visibility.)
There is never an excuse for not visually clearing a runway before entering it.
I'm not saying its easy, I'm actually specifically saying it's such a hard job we should have automated most of it away ages ago. If the only thing stopping an accident like this is an ATC employee, this _will_ happen in the future.
They came up with rail signals long before the idea of a computer even existed. It's hard to believe voice only communication of routes and runway access is the best path forward. Especially when passenger airliners are involved.
There are so many failure modes with vehicles and planes using the same tarmac that I fail to see how anything would be worth developing here that doesn't eliminate that requirement altogether.
Presumably this is lack of familiarity with this on the part of firefighters.
Automation is fantastic. We use it extensively in aviation. However, the long tail of 9s in reliable requires constant vigilance and oversight because anything that can go wrong will.
In this case, from the available information, the drivers of the fire truck thought they were cleared, and proceeded to cross while a plane was cleared to land. I'm not familiar with ATC ground radio to know if they were actually cleared or not, but it seems clear that that the drivers thought they were cleared.
Investigation reports will give us more details.
> If an Air Traffic Control clearance is in conflict with the Runway Entrance Lights, do not cross over the red lights. Contact Air Traffic Control and advise that you are stopped due to red lights. (ex.: "Orlando Ground, Ops 2 is holding short of runway 36 Left at Echo due to red lights").
Airports are highly controlled environments unlike typical motor vehicle roadways and generally the same rules apply for aircraft, vehicles, and equipment on airport surface movement areas. From all sources I can find, if the RWSLs were working they should have been red and nobody should have entered the runway without further clarification from ATC.
However that is not permissible here. Airplanes are similar to trains, you have to stop and wait and there are no exceptions.
Just to add…
The vehicle in question got clearance from ATC to cross the runway. ATC revoked it shortly afterwards (by radioing "Tower, Truck 1. Stop truck 1. Stop! Stop Truck 1, STOP!" (followed by the incident; the next transmission is go-arounds.)); presumably, ATC realized the impending danger. I am assuming that requesting permission from ATC to enter a runway in an emergency is a permitted action, so RWSL aren't going to prevent this type of incident.
I don't think we know why Truck 1 did not heed the stop warning (e.g., if it came too later, got lost, etc.), but I am thinking that if they understood the indication from the RWSL, they overrode it by getting clearance, because they needed to cross the runway due to the (first) emergency.
So, same. Will be curious to see what NTSB says. I suspect something about resource management: there seems to be too much happening, too quickly, for that one ATC controller. While perhaps the controller makes mistakes, the mistakes appear to my untrained ear as "reasonable", and I'd like the system to be such that reasonable mistakes don't cost lives.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
From what I've found it seems like the indication of the RWSL should match the clearance from ATC. This to me suggests a ground vehicle is permitted to request:
> • DO NOT proceed when the Runway Entrance Lights have extinguished without an Air Traffic Control clearance. Runway Status Lights verifies an Air Traffic Control clearance, it DOES NOT substitute for an Air Traffic Control clearance.
> • If an Air Traffic Control clearance is in conflict with the Runway Entrance Lights, do not cross over the red lights. Contact Air Traffic Control and advise that you are stopped due to red lights.
The page never directly states it¹, but the implication is that a ground vehicle can request clearance, and the clearance from the ATC can be granted, & RWSL should match. If they do not match, red RWSL prevails, and green RWSL are not a substitute for clearance.
Truck 1 did request clearance. So then the question for this incident would be "what was the status of the RWSL when Truck 1 entered the runway?"² If they were red, according to the linked page, Truck 1 should not have entered the RW regardless of the clearance, and the mismatch between ATC verbally granting clearance & the RWSL system seems problematic. But, I don't know what the actual status of the RWSL was, so.
… hopefully, the NTSB report in a few months will contain an explanation.
¹I am treating this page as a non-authoritative explainer, not as legal regulations.
²The one video I've seen of the incident is not clear enough for me to make out the RWSL.
I read a theory that there's only one radio in the truck that needs to be switched between frequencies.
Presumably the truck driver got clearance from the tower then immediately switched away to the frequency that the firefighters use to coordinate.
Tweet showing the video of the collision:
https://x.com/MCCCANM/status/2036131991792550351?s=20
Here is a diagram showing their locations.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl/media/LGA.pd...
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...
I'm sure the NTSB report will cover why this didn't stop the accident. Presumably either the system wasn't working as-expected, or the fire truck proceeded despite the warning lights since they had clearance from the controller.
The system is only advisory at present, so if the truck did see a warning light and proceeded anyway, they were technically permitted to do so.
Traffic lights instead of mad max intersections are better.
Then there's subway Automatic Train Control.
I don't know that Air Traffic Control staff don't have computer systems for establishing which plane owns what airspace. They at least did do it manually already following specific processes, so it can be at least augmented and a computer can check for conflicts automatically (if it isn't already). And, sure, ATC could still use radio, but there could be a digital standard for ensuring everybody has access to all local airspace data. Or maybe that wouldn't help.
Your ground vehicle wanting to cross a runway could have the driver punch "cross runway 5" button (cross-referenced with GPS) and try to grab an immediate 30 second mutex on it. The computer can check that the runway is not allocated in that time (i.e. it could be allocated 2 minutes in the future, and that would be fine).
But, as pointed out elsewhere, obviously some of this is already present: stop lights are supposed to be present at this intersection.
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...
How many runways crossings are there in a year? How much is "1700+" a percentage of that total?
And the cost of investigating 1,700 should be within the budget.
If 1,700 is a minuscule fraction of all runway uses (as it likely is) then investigating it should be a proportionally minuscule amount of the budget.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runway_incursion#Definition
* https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/resources/runway_...
All incursions (in the US) are tracked:
* https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/statistics
Given there are ~45,000 flights per days in the US (and so aircraft and vehicles would move hither and fro around an airport for each flight), 1700 feels like a small number.
Human can misspeak or mishear instructions, but if they were communicated and understood correctly (a read back was correct), but the pilot had a 'brain fart' and went forward instead of stopping, how do we eliminate brain farts?
See 5-2-5 for an example:
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html...
NOTE- Previous reviews of air traffic events, involving LUAW instructions, revealed that a significant number of pilots read back LUAW instructions correctly and departed without a takeoff clearance. LUAW instructions are not to be confused with a departure clearance; the outcome could be catastrophic, especially during intersecting runway operations.
The older term was "hold short runway X" and that was too close to "hold runway X" - the first meant do NOT enter the runway, the second meant enter and line up but do NOT takeoff.
We talk about Vision Zero for streets. Vision Zero is actually achievable in aviation.
FAA defines it as "Any occurrence at an aerodrome involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on the protected area of a surface designated for the landing and take off of aircraft." [0]
Many runway incursions run no risk of any accident, but are still flagged as issues, investigated, and punished if appropriate.
[0] https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/resources/runway_...
Or to stick with the language of the analogy, every fruit tree has some fruit that is lower than the others. That doesn't mean all "low-hanging fruit" is within arm's reach of the ground, some fruit just doesn't require as big of a ladder as other fruit.
This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case. I don't know enough about ATC to have any confidence in my opinion on the viability of replacing humans with software.
That was my first comment in this thread, so there was no established goal to change. My sole goal was to clarify the meaning of an idiom that the comment I was replying to was misstating.
I even included a disclaimer that "This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case", so I don't know how you could have received it as such.
>the obvious or easy things that can be most readily done or dealt with in achieving success or making progress toward an objective
So not only can it be "obvious" rather than "easy", it is also in the context of "achieving success or making progress toward an objective". There is nothing in the definition that requires either this specific step or the overall goal to be easy.
[1] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/low-hanging%20fru...
Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.
....if they go around kilometer of the runway the fire will turn into bigger fire
I imagine the training will consist of something like changing the comms protocol to say “runway lights are on, control. Truck 1 confirming cross runway 4D?” prior to crossing. Double check so to speak.
Pilots and controllers speak the same language in the same order; ground vehicles just kinda say stuff.
The aviation-ized version of your proposal would be something like this:
> tower truck 1 short of 4 at delta, red status lights
This isn't a Kubernetes cluster where you can add VMs in 30 seconds.
Even if most of the work is routine, you definitely still want a human in the loop.
A naive view that confuses the map with the territory.
While in a database state you write a row and reality updates atomically....for aircraft they exist in a physical world where your model lives with lag, noise, and lossy sensors, and that world keeps moving whether your software is watching or not. Failed database transactions roll back, a landing clearance issued against stale state does not. The hard problem in ATC is not coordination logic but physical objects with momentum, human agency, and failure modes that do not respect your consistency model.
Literally the crash here was caused by a fire truck entering the runway.
No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
People are saying automation could handle a significant portion of the routine things allowing humans to handle the more complex/finicky issues.
Even if automation could handle 10% of the most common situations it would be a huge boon. In reality its probably closer to 50%.
Very possibly. It will be interesting what comes from the investigation.
> No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
I’m asking if it would have solved even the current situation. The truck presumably saw the red light, and was asking to cross. Would traffic control have said no if more had been automated and if so, what automation would fix this? Unless we are supposing the truck would be autonomously driven and refuse to proceed when planes are landing, in which case, maybe, though that’s not really ATC automation anymore.
To be clear, though, I don’t even have significant aviation knowledge. But this isn’t hard to learn about. That’s part of what irks me so much about this tone. It’s not just “I’m so smart” it’s “I’m so confident that you’re dumb that I don’t need to know anything about the domain you’re working in to know better than you”. Someone could ask ChatGPT why airports don’t have stoplights to stop traffic from crossing the runway and it would reveal the existence of this system.
This frustates me to no end. Is it just an example of the Dunning–Kruger effect?
There are many issues with DK, and the paper’s widely misunderstood. For one, the primary figure demonstrates a positive correlation between confidence and competence, so according to DK’s own paper, high confidence is not an indicator of incompetence, contrary to popular belief. The paper also measured things in a very funny way (by having participants rank themselves against other people of unknown skill), and it measured only very simple things (like basic grammar, and ability to get a joke), and it only polled Cornell undergrads (no truly incompetent people), and there were a tiny number of participants receiving extra credit (might exclude the As and Fs in the class). Many smart people have come to the conclusion that DK is a statistical artifact of the way they did their experiment, not a real cognitive bias. Some smart people have pointed out that DK is probably popular because it’s really tempting to believe - we like the idea of arrogant people getting justice. The paper also primes the reader, telling them what to believe even though the title isn’t truly supported by the data. It’s an interesting read that I think would not pass today’s publication criteria.
Anyway, sorry, slash rant.
My grandfather had a rule at his business for 55-ish years: we welcome your ideas and suggestions, but not for the first year. You spend that time learning our processes, decisions behind them, pain points, areas that need improvement, etc. You also spend that time doing the work and hearing from your colleagues. Then you can (hopefully) make informed suggestions. That's not possible in every situation, but I like the intent.
This is an amazingly positive spin on the behavior.
even my cheap car has geofencing and automatic braking
I've worked on avionics professionally and I haven't crashed any of my planes yet...
It will be interesting to see what the report says. Did the light system not function? Did they override it? Do they ignore it consistently?
> geofencing and automatic braking
I’m not at all sure I want emergency vehicles to be blocked like this. And if they can override then it’s no different. They didn’t roll onto the runway on accident.
> I've worked on avionics professionally and I haven't crashed any of my planes yet...
Is this relevant somehow?
If the reason you have the human there is to handle the unusual cases, you run the real risk that they just aren't paying attention at critical moments when they need to pay attention.
It's pretty similar to the problem with L3 autonomous driving.
Probably the sweet spot is automation which makes clear the current set of instructions on the airport which also red flags when a dangerous scenario is created. I believe that already exists, but it's software that was last written in 1995 or so.
Regardless, before any sort of new automation could be deployed, we need slack for the ATC to be able to adopt a new system. That's the biggest pressing problem. We could create the perfect software for ATC, but if the current air traffic controllers are all working overtime and doing a job designed for 3 people rather than one, they simply won't have the time to explore and understand that new system. It'll get in the way rather than solve a problem. More money is part of the solution here, but we also need a revamped ATC training program which can help to fill the current hole.
Digital comms is available in the US:
* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/DataComm
The issue is that the final approach and landing (and taxiing?) environments are probably too dynamic for that: in this particular situation one of the vehicles was responding to an emergency (fire).
In addition to huge planes, there is baggage transportation, passenger buses (to mid-field terminals), fuel pumpers, emergency vehicles, snow plows, deicers, and general maintenance vehicles (clear debris off runways).
I would settle for a good digital system with an ability to issue emergency/priority calls to specific receivers. Oh, and full-duplex communication.
I'm practicing for a sports pilot license, and I really have problems with understanding other pilots and the ATC.
Voice communication is insane? I suspect you are ignorant of what it is like to actually fly a large aircraft into a busy airport. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment.
There is some interesting research that captures this sentiment and shows how complex a solution might need to be (replace "faulty agent" with "human error"): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00051...
Almost all voice transmissions are routine instructions/clearances from ground to air, with the pilots reading them back to reduce the chance of errors. In fact, this already exists and is in wide use in (at least) the US, EU, and in transoceanic airspace.
Of course, now you have two systems that can fail, and reducing reliance on the older one can easily cause automation complacency (which is a well-researched source of errors) and require more frequent refresher courses if the skill is not practiced on a continuos basis.
I suspect that that these are the reasons it's not commonly used for approach and tower operations: There's a lot more spontaneous and/or nonstandard stuff happening in those flight phases, and as you say you don't want a pilot's eyes on a tiny screen/keyboard instead of on their instruments or out the window.
I don't doubt that it's a very safe system with enough slack allowing for intentional redundancy. But as it is, some of these controllers seem to be limited by their ability to pronounce instructions, leaving absolutely no margin for error and presumably very little room for conscious thought.
There is digital comms with ATC without voice:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller–pilot_data_link_com...
* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/DataComm
But in the highly dynamic environment of final approach, landing, and taxiing, I doubt it would be practical. Unless we want to try autonomous 'driving' on taxiways and runways?
My father works ATC and his schedule has him working overtime, 6 shifts a week, including overnight shifts, meaning that there is literally not a day of the week where he doesn't spend at least some time in the tower.
If that's the reality for even half of the controllers, it's no surprise that we've been seeing more and more traffic accidents lately.
> tendency to strip funding until disaster happens
well there's a tendency to pass unfunded mandates too. They are two sides of the same coin. Here's another way I've heard it described, to show you that this is a "bipartisan" issue:
> the Daily Show problem. I love the Daily Show, and I think Jon Stewart is hysterical. But literally the answer to every single problem is “Congress should pass a new law.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/10/marc-andreessen-in-c...
i don't think Marc Andreessen knows everything about everything the way that he thinks that he does. but he's not wrong. you are in the really lame "Congress should pass a new law" department - i guess to increase funding? - but you know, then it becomes, i don't see why it would be "enough" funding, we don't know, they could strike anyway...
personally, i believe the problem with guilded professions like "ATC guy" come about from complex but nonetheless finite incentives. so in a narrow sense, as long as some ATC controllers want to "work more, earn more," this problem will persist, it doesn't even have to be all ATC controllers, or even many, but the proportion of "work more, earn more" to "work less, earn less" personalities predicts the scale of the issues facing buyers of the guilded profession's services. other economists have talked about this and i'm sure someone will write great Causality Revolution paper about it for ATC.
broadly I think the problem has much more to do with the lack of economic opportunity in America, that there's minimum wage and everything else, and people are very risk averse like their peers in Europe or Asia but have less of a safety net so they are much more desperate. everyone is looking to guilds to solve their problem instead of demanding that their leaders support and deliver real growth, which makes me sound like Peter Thiel, and that should tell you everything you need to know about why this problem is so hard to solve. it's all politics, not a misunderstanding of the math about maintenance or disasters or whatever the fuck.
This isn't some vague problem, it's a random asshole screaming "delete! Delete! Delete!" enlisting some random college dropouts to execute it for him, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives directly attributable to those short sighted changes.
This isn't a vague problem, it's a specific asshole who is killing people so he can appear on stage with a chainsaw.
Also, ATC controllers are not the one in power here. It is not like they would made the decisions that lead to here.
The union pretty loudly and early on pointed out major problems with that job and the response of ignoring them for 4 decades is what's driven us to the current situation.
A union that isn't allowed to legally strike when needed isn't a useful union though. The state that ATC has been in for the decades after that suggests to me that they were correct to strike.
Multiple economic write ups have concluded that Reagan’s “stick it to the upstart guy” cost us tax payers way more than it would if they’d just acceded and maybe even thrown in a gracious bonus to say thanks.
Larger sociology say the intangible cost to labor balance laws actually were much more.
Reagan’s trickle down (great euphemism for “piss on”) movement was the beginning of the demise of the GOP IMO. Disclaimed: I voted both times for him and many GOP followers.
How dare those peons use their economic leverage! That's only for the upper class
Their employer, the Federal government, was free to fire them, and did.
Why not blame any number of people who held the same office between then and now who have equivalent power to fix the system?
If we assign blame to this dead guy a long time ago, then there is no accountability to be had.
You're absolutely right that solutions should have been taken, but it's also true that we're picking up the pieces of a decision taken forty years ago.
Source: /r/ATC. I highly recommend lurking there.
In my job we work 40h a week + oncall rotating. It works.
We get it, @ExtraRoulette. You're big pimpin'.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046401
But I don't think we should extrapolate from it.
Overweight/obesity combined: ~73-75% (nearly 3 in 4 adults) in the US.
Try it!
Or don't. Feels good to mog people by just being normal weight.
Personal responsibility sure but that often comes with utter ignorance of the systems that people find themselves in, especially poverty and mental health. The bottom 50% own nothing, have no security, and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.
I was obese most of my adult life. It absolutely cost me more to eat cheap (as in nutrition) shitty fast foods than prepare things from base ingredients. It was more convenient and it was the easy path for sure, but absolutely in no way a means to save money. It costs vastly more. I could only afford to get fat once I started making money. Growing up we were too poor to eat that horribly.
But since you'd like to speak about price it seems, I'd posit that for a good long while there, dollar menu items were genuinely about as cheap as you could get for food - $4 on the way home from work and get an hour of time back to unwind? It was worth it to me - heck, a lot of the time I used that time to be in the gym.
I'll grant you that pretty much any restaurant you'd sit down in where you don't pay at the counter is utterly more expensive - 3x the ingredient cost at least.
But we're not comparing steaks and chicken entrees here, we're comparing rice & beans and chicken breast vs a McDouble or $5 footlong. Weeknight roasts that you have to plan ahead for, Sunday meal prep days. Its all time - I recognize this because I choose to take that time on, and its time that I don't get to spend on other stuff.
In the extreme case you don't even need a proper kitchen - a microwave, a rice cooker, and some large bowls will suffice. You can reliably find all of those things at thrift stores in the US. You also have the option to purchase dry staples in bulk (rice, oatmeal, pasta, etc) in 10, 25, or even 50 lb sacks if you can find a local place that stocks them (costco for example).
This is provably untrue. It is such a tired trope to constantly refute. I guess I need to start a google doc with citations.
It is FAR cheaper to buy staples and cook your own food at home. And healthier. You do not need to eat farm to table veggies and local meat for this to happen.
Anyone who tells you it is cheaper to eat fast food and prepared junk foods is misinformed or outright lying with an agenda.
Just look at every single immigrant community that migrates here. They know how to prepare food for cheap.
Yes, it takes a time investment and skill. No, the trope of "single mother with 3 jobs" is not a thing. Those people are already feeding their family healthy foods for the most part since they have self-selected for caring and putting effort in. I lived in communities with many such folks, and the ones holding down three jobs in no way fed their kids fast food or microwaved meals on a regular basis.
If anything is a luxury it's being able to eat prepared fast foods for the majority of your diet. Growing up McDonalds was a twice a year treat for special occasions. Peeling potatoes and baking bread from actual flour and yeast was the daily chores.
It’s an argument that if you make changes slowly enough people won’t notice.
Other 19th-century experiments were purported to show that frogs did not attempt to escape gradually heated water. An 1872 experiment by Heinzmann was said to show that a normal frog would not attempt to escape if the water was heated slowly enough, which was corroborated in 1875 by German scientist Carl Fratscher.
I don't see the point of the experiment with the brain removed, but given that they did the experiment with intact frogs as well confirms their original hypothesis.
However, later on in the article, it's been disputed in recent years: as the water is heated by about 2 °F (about 1 °C), per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if it can. Earlier it also says that frogs put into already water just die (not mentioned, but presumably from shock) and so don't have a chance to start attempting to jump out. I imagine humans dumped into boiling water would have a similar response.
I wrote this 12 years ago and it's even more true today: https://magarshak.com/blog/stop-wasting-our-time/
I'm Australian. In Australia, if you are forced to work overtime the rate of pay goes up, by 50% or if it's extreme, double. As a consequence "underpaid" isn't a common complaint of people working lots of overtime.
This has some negative consequences of course. If labour is plentiful you can have lots of people on hand and pay them on an hours-worked basis. The same deal applies - if you go beyond 40 hours a week their rate of pay goes up, but that shouldn't happen if labour is plentiful and management is on the ball.
But if, as in this case labour isn't plentiful, then they are going to have to fix it some other way - like paying to train more staff. What the employers can't do is offload the problem entirely onto their employees, so there are forces compelling them to get their act together.
The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US.
See: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-...
This is from a popular 90s country song:
sleep would be best
but i just can't afford to rest
have to be in Denver at morning light
- much too young to feel this damn old
Unfortunately, this is now priced into certain government jobs in the USA and people rely on it. Americans see the obscene amounts of money and hours as a challenge until they actually burn out.
ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.
There's definitely elements of that - but part of that is that many pensions are based on the two highest earning years of your career, so it's "common" among cops when they are planning to retire to spend two years working every possible piece of OT available, to maximize their pension income.
Mind you, in the UK, defined benefits pension schemes are very rare nowadays, but where they exist they are defined as a percentage of the final year salary with that company, so the highest 2 year thing seems a bit weird to me but for a different reason.
The obvious reason that US air traffic control has been understaffed for "a while now" is that, roughly a decade ago, the FAA caved in to political pressure to stop having so many white controllers by decommissioning any hiring practices that posed a risk of hiring white controllers.
This meant the size of the workforce froze, stressing the system.
Tracing Woodgrains went into a good amount of depth on the scandal: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
It’s analogous to this hypothetical conversation:
“XYZ Politician is a corrupt official who needs to be investigated”
“Well actually, corruption is everywhere.”
See how that downplays and changes the subject at hand?
Not everyone is overworked and underpaid like ATC workers. The US government needs to implement real reforms to rectify that situation.
There have been many attempts to change phraseology, teach pilots and controllers to always readback runways, etc. but nothing that actually prevents the issue from occurring entirely via automation.
The pilot was given the clearance to land before the fire engine was dispatched. Apparently there was not even enough time for the crew to max out the thrust and try to lift off the strip even if they managed to notice the lights of the incoming fire engine.
A similar system can and should be used for runways.
As a thought experiment, imagine how many car accidents there would be if instead of traffic lights, each person had a AM radio in their car and police officers called out over the radio which cars should proceed across the intersection. That is the unfortunate state of modern? aviation.
The technology already exists. The problem has already been solved with an iPad and a $200 receiver. Almost certainly some BS regulation or rule was at least partially responsible here.
It wouldn't need to work 100% of the time because you'd still be required to contact ATC. The only requirement is that it have a reasonably high chance of alerting drivers to potential mistakes before they happen.
Which is to say this incident was trivially preventable had anyone with authority over these sorts of things cared to bother.
Almost every fire department in the country has SOPs for operating in emergency mode that generally include coming to a stop at all intersections or at least being able to affirmatively clear the intersection.
This personal liability is not particularly appealing in the world of fire, where ~70% of US firefighters are volunteer (not that the story is better in career), so codifying it in SOP allows departments/governments to negotiate insurance policies for their members, saying that "if you were driving in emergency mode, but within SOP, the department's insurance will cover your personal liability".
I saw the video. The incoming engine didn't appear to slow until too late, either.
Clearly human-run ATC results in situations like this, so the idea that automated ATC could result in a runway collision and should therefore never be implemented is bad.
You obviously wouldn't authorize the bot to do everything, but you could allow it to autonomously call for stops or go-arounds in a situation like this where a matter of a few seconds almost certainly would have made the difference.
Imagine the human controller gives the truck clearance to cross and the bot immediately sees the problem and interrupts with "No, Truck 1 stop, no clearance. JZA 646 pull up and go around." If either message gets through then the collision is avoided, and in case of a false positive, it's a 30 second delay for the truck and a few minutes to circle the plane around and give it a new slot.
If we aren't confident enough in the automation to allow it to make the call for something simple like a runway incursion/conflict (via total automation), augmentation might be worse than the current approach that calls for 100% awareness by the ATC. Self-driving research shows that at level 2 and level 3, people tune out and need time to get back "in the zone" during a failure of automation.
In doctor's offices it was easy, just listen to the verbal consult and write up a summary so doc doesn't spend every evening charting. What is the equivalent for ATC, in terms of an interface that would help surface relevant information, maintain context while multitasking, provide warnings, etc, basically something that is a companion and assistant but not in a way that removes agency from the human decision-maker or leaves them subject to zoning out and losing context so they're not equipped to handle an escalation?
Depends both on the form the "alarm" takes as well as the false positive rate. If the alarm is simply being told to go around, and if that has the same authority as a human, then it's an inconvenience but there shouldn't be any fatigue. Just frustration at being required to do something unnecessary.
Assuming the false positive rate were something like 1 incident per day at a major airport I don't even think it would result in much frustration. We stop at red lights that aren't really necessary all the time.
Even if it's just a warning to the ATC, distracting them and forcing them to reexamine a false positive call interrupts their flow and airspace awareness. I get what you're saying, that we could err on the side of alert first, out of precaution; but all our proposed solutions would really come down to just how good the false positive and false negative rates are.
BTW, stopping at a red light unnecessarily (or by extension, gunning it to get through a yellow/red light) could get you rear ended or cause a collision. Hard breaking and hard acceleration events are both penalized by insurance driver trackers because of that.
This specific situation I think could instead have been cheaply and easily avoided if the ground vehicle had been carrying a GPS enabled appliance that ingested ADS-B data and displayed for the driver any predicted trajectories in the vicinity that were near the ground. Basically a panel in the vehicle showing where any nearby ADS-B equipped planes were expected to be within the next 30 seconds or so.
> stopping at a red light unnecessarily
Is it not always legally necessary where you live? It certainly is here. When I described them as unnecessary I was recalling situations that would clearly be better served by a flashing yellow.
That is how it is supposed to work. How did it work in reality is an other question of course, and no doubt it will be investigated.
The reason we won't ever have self-driving cars is that no matter how clever you make them, they're only any good when nothing is going wrong. They cannot anticipate, they can only react, too slowly, and often badly.
Self driving cars' reaction times aren't slowed by drugs, alcohol, or a Snapchat notification pulling their attention.
Current systems haven't been proven in all weather conditions and all inclement situations (ie that tesla collision with a white semi-trailer), but it's crazy to say that self-driving cars won't match or exceed human drivers in terms of safe miles driven. Waymo has already shown an 80 to 90% reduction in crashes compared to people.
Compared to unsafe people. It's an important caveat though I agree with the larger point you're making.
As I stated earlier I agree with the broader point you were trying to make. I like what they're doing. It's just important to be clear about what human skill actually looks like in this case - a multimodal distribution that's highly biased by category.
We can probably semi automate runway crossing. Someone mentioned red lights when you definitely cannot cross
You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there forever, and not enough humans on the ground to manually land them.
Now image the outage is also happening at all airports nearby, preventing planes from diverting.
How do you get the planes out of the sky? Not enough humans to do it manually.
Now imagine the system comes back online. Does it know how to handle a crisis scenario where you have dozens of planes overhead, each about to run out of fuel? Hopefully someone thought of that edge case.
Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage? Now do that, but with airplanes that will fall thousands of feet and kill hundreds instead of park in the middle of the street.
I'm not saying we shouldn't automate things. We should. But, it's not easy. If it was, we would have done it already.
I remember.
Do you remember (before Waymo existed) what happened to traffic in SF anytime the power went out?
I remember. It was pretty much the identical situation.
Traffic goes to hell when the traffic lights stop working properly (without Waymo and also with Waymo).
One of the failure modes should not be “guy forgot thing”.
It already is.
> Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.
Planes divert to another airport, passengers grumble, end of story. Airport closures can and do happen all the time for all kinds of reasons, including weather or equipment malfunctions.
My suggestion is to restrict the use of smaller jets like crj and turboprops. I know airports like LaGuardia can't handle the big jets either, but they could reduce the slots and require a jet that holds, say, 150 people or more. This would result in fewer flights per day to some airports, but reduce overall congestion while still serving the same number of passengers.
> In audio from the air traffic control tower at LaGuardia, a staff member can be heard saying: "'Truck One, stop, stop, stop!" in the seconds before the crash.
It sounds to me like either the Cop or the Firefighter (whichever was driving) wasn't listening to ATC and this whole incident was probably completely avoidable.
EDIT: a video of the crash seems to have warning lights that the emergency vehicle ignored.
It seems like less than 2 seconds from declaring intent to cross until they are told not to cross.
The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.
> Audio is not synced.
I think the gaps between transmissions have been trimmed, too; this isn't matching other versions of the ATC audio, such as [VASAviation's][1].
> The runway entrance lights look red to me which is also a huge warning flag.
IANA-ATC, but presumably in an emergency, you're permitted to obtain clearance from ATC to enter an active runaway, to get to the emergency. (Which they did, and got, but which ATC later effectively revokes with the command to stop, prior to the accident. Whether ATC should have granted the clearance, well, I'll wait for the NTSB report there.)
One controller working tower duties, ground movement duties, coordinating with other ATC functions off the radio, an active emergency request, and giving clearance amendments all within 2 minutes. It's insane understaffing. On top of it, there was nobody there to take over after the crash. He worked the whole cleanup for the next 30 minutes.
This is an Olympian level elite Air Traffic Controller who was setup to fail.
I've visited towers, center facilities, and have flying (and some instructing) in the San Francisco airspace for 10 years. That kind of failure is systemic way above an individual.
If so, doesn't the understaffing (lower # of employees) result in each employee being overpaid (paid a higher hourly rate)?
EDIT: And it seems like air traffic controllers can retire after just 20 years and draw a defined benefit pension: https://www.faa.gov/nyc-atc
The mystery to me is that AT shortages have been known fora. while now, so why haven't many more trainees been recruited?
ATC has been a shit career prospect for a while now so no one wants to enter training.
For one it requires uprooting your entire life to live near a training center, then they send you on an apprenticeship to a random airport in the country for a few years. And since there are only so many slots in the desirable metros, most people get sent to live somewhere “undesirable” to say the least.
For two, while trainees get paid they get totally fucked during government shutdowns. Many who make it to the funnel also quit at that point. Without fundamental structural changes to how they’re trained and paid at the political level, the number of trainees will remain small.
The money doesn't somehow make it sustainable for the people burning out their lives. Working 7 days a week, including overnight shifts, for 20 years to collect a pension seems like WELL earned compensation.
That's seems unrelated to "we have so few" and "we enmiserate the one's we do have".
It's hard to argue you're underpaid if, as a result of short staffing, you're getting paid more (both in absolute terms and per unit of effort) than you signed up for.
You can still do contract ATC work after 56.
You can’t account for overtime in pensions because the employees will conspire to force overtime for retiring employees to bounce the pension up. Just a natural risk with an entity that can’t go bankrupt hiring people.
Controller probably should've told them to expedite the crossing or warned that traffic was about to land, but they were managing a lot at once; tower+ground by themselves and an emergency already.
Doing it at LaGuardia or any major airport is absolutely nuts.
Add a few seconds for human reaction time on both ends, I don't think that's really "enough time to cross safely" - maybe if the stars align.
Hard disagree. The ATC initially cleared them to cross the runway. The truck started moving, and just then the ATC realised that they made a mistake and tried to fix it. Even their first attempt at that was unclear, and they only clarified who should stop on the second attempt.
People can’t react in zero second, trucks don’t stop immediately. The ATC mistake was clearing them to cross the runway, whatever happened after was out of their hands.
If the ATC is under staffed they’d charge a far higher premium since the risk of accidents is higher.
I’m not sure who would be liable for this accident, I’m guessing ATC is a government provided industry, and I understand governments don’t insure.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-begins-firings-o...
The real issue is just insufficient slots.
I'm gonna guess that code never went into production. The problem seems easy until you start looking under the hood.
CPDLC is already being deployed domestically. It's currently available to all operators in en route segments.
All runway incursions at towered airports are reported, classified according to risk, and investigated.
I wouldn't be so quick to rule out that there's some kind of relatively easy technological double check that could greatly reduce incidents. The fact that we've not gotten there despite years of effort to reduce runway incursions doesn't mean that it's not possible.
But calling a replacement of major ATC functions with software a "simple fix" is a perfect illustration of why this is a bad idea. Nothing about human-rated safety-critical software is simple, and coming at it with the attitude that it is? In my view, as an experienced pilot, flight instructor, spacecraft operator, and software engineer, that thinking is utterly disqualifying.
Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL, which didn't prevent this accident.
> Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL
It'll be interesting to hear why RWSL didn't help, as it is supposedly deployed at LGA.
Yes, I know it probably costs $300k, surely today you can have a $10k ground version.
You could also show every plane on a screen inside the vehicle and have some loud alarms if they are on a collision path.
You could even just display FlightRadar24, still better than nothing.
You would still get permission for the tower, this would not be an allow system, just a deny system.
TCAS on planes is disabled below 1000±100' (~300m) AGL (above ground level).
ADS-B on vehicles is already a thing (and FAA certified):
* https://uavionix.com/airports-and-atm/vtu-20/
There are three categories of runway incursion types: operator/ATC error, pilot error, pedestrian/vehicle. Even if someone 'knows' that they need to "hold short runway 12", they can still have a brain fart and go through the hold short line.
Unless you want to argue that all vehicles taxiing have to operate (SAE Level 4) autonomously?
This is a REALLY hard problem that the US cannot solve alone. It would require extensive global coordination.
Not insurmountable, but this is not something you can easily roll out piecemeal. If even a single aircraft lacks the compatible equipment you're back to the existing system.
Ok, let's not try improving systems, how's that working out?
I feel the same way about close calls on the road, especially ones involving a vehicle and a vulnerable road user like a pedestrian or cyclist. Way too many lives being saved by a person jumping out of the way at the last minute who shouldn't have had to do so, and then cops and bureaucrats shrugging with "well what do you want us to do, the numbers don't show enough fatalities here for it to be worth fixing" and later when someone actually does die it becomes "this is a horrible tragedy that no one could have seen coming, let's focus on thoughts and prayers rather than accountability that could lead to structural change."
Which has always seemed a little nuts, like in case of hit and run it would definitely be possible to take action based on a plate alone, both for police and insurance purposes. Unless the registered owner can point to the not-them person who was driving their car at that time, then it was them. Or it was stolen, but either way there will be a clear paper trail.
All that creates a mountain of work and man hours that any police department in America would likely put on low priority.
Basically our legal system is too forgiving and the possibility that someone stole their car (even if it was a friend) and returned it 20 minutes later exists, and therefore it's on the police to prove it wasn't.
And the law is pretty hard to change since it would change it to 'guilty until proven innocent'.
How is it more mountain-of-workish for the policemen if that’s not a rental but my own?
Not true, at least in the US. You are innocent unless it can be positively demonstrated that you were the one driving.
For a serious enough incident the police will invest the necessary time to collect evidence that you were in fact the one driving. But that's costly to do.
I remember a debate a year or two ago about a plane ignoring instructions (IIRC it had changed frequencies) and had taxiied onto a runway when a plane was landing. Luckily the landing plane saw this and do a go around so nobody was harmed.
In the aftermath, there were similar complaints to yours. "Why can't they just have lights to block planes when a departing or landing plane was using the runway?" without thinking through how any of that works. For a start:
- How do you allocate that a runway is "in use"?
- If ATC does it, what if they fail to turn the system on?
- What if turning it on or off fails?
- What if it gets stuck on or off? How do you fix it? Are there procedures for ATC to override it anyway?
- There are multiple entry points to a runway. What if they're in different states?
- What company si going to sell such a system and accept liability?
- What training requirements will be needed for ATC and the pilots?
- What do you do if a pilot goes ahead and ignores it?
I think people can't think beyond cars. Cars have had unimaginable effort put into them so they can only operate within a certain window. Even then they require maintenance.
But as soon as you scale up to industrial safety and control systems, a power plant, the engine on a ship, etc you will end up with a bunch of controls where the people using them need to be skilled operators and it is essentially impossible to eliminate mistakes with automation and IT systems. You will need overrides. You will need redundancies. You will need to end up doing things nobody has ever considered before and have to rely upon training, education and experience to go beyond the envelope. That's just how it works.
How would you do it, then?
We use AM simplex radio. That means everyone hears everyone else and that helps everyone build a situational awareness picture. Secondly we use AM because if someone transmits over someone else it makes a squealing noise so you know it happened. Also AM propagates pretty well.
Most people on HN could design a pretty good digital replacement in a few minutes - and no doubt some have been suggested in these comments. But its instructive to understand a bit about aviation history. The liability risk carried by aircraft and avionics manufacturers at one point go so bad that we stopped making general aviation planes in the USA. Then that liability was limited to a very small extent by GARA, and we had what we call the 'restart' of manufacturing.
So the idea of introducing a new mandatory replacement (not addition like ADS-B) for AM comms has a lot of resistance from quite a few areas: Manufacturers don't want to have to make the capex to reinvent and recertify new equipment. The US has a lot of old planes due to the lack of innovation because of the liability issue - and so those old planes all need a retrofit and pilots don't want to spend that money. Avionics for certified aircraft is already horrifically expensive. Legislators don't want to take on the risk of an incident attached to a bill they sponsored. And then there's the practical matter of now having two systems - the legacy AM comms, and the modern one that some have and some don't and the split in situational awareness between those populations.
So while full-duplex is seductive, and digital is seductive, and satellite seems like the obvious endgame - the reality of transitioning is very difficult.
Vehicles are listening to the same audio the pilots are, so they have the same mental picture of what's going on. Last week I talked to a maintenance vehicle at KBLI directly from the air because he was on a runway I needed to land on, at an untowered field. He cleared it, I landed, and he went about his business. So the system works pretty well most of the time.
I think the root of the issue here is actually something else. Firstly there is a lot of dissatisfaction among NATCA members (ATC union) towards their union, and the view seems to be that the union could be doing a lot better job of lobbying for their workers. You can visit /r/atc or /r/atc2 on reddit to learn more.
Secondly, the USA has fallen into a nasty trap where our government has positive incentives to choreograph shutdowns to get our congress members and senate members the face time that they crave. So there is a negative incentive to resolve a shutdown. Rather let it get hot, let it play out, and maybe you'll be the one to appear to save the day to your constituents. The trouble with this is that the department that creates one of the highest risks for civilians in a very visible way, is the FAA and the controllers in particular. So they have become a political football. And they're in an extremely stressful job without pay. And that's a very big problem.
You're seeing this play out in a growing adversarial relationship between the NTSB (e.g. DCA) and FAA, with NTSB tearing FAA a new one recently for DCA - and rightly so. I think that's led to more demotivation at FAA which hasn't helped.
So the situation is spiraling out of control. We have controllers who are overworked, who regularly don't get paid, and a union not doing the greatest job at advocating for them. Along with the recent cuts in government funding across the board.
It's frustrating for pilots. The best we've been able to do is bring our local TRACON folks stacks of free pizza, both in Colorado and Seattle. But that's obviously a token gesture. I don't see a way out of it. To be perfectly honest. And it's very frustrating because the amount of good work that FAA does, is quite startling. You'd be amazed how much data they produce including real-time feeds that are freely available to devs like us. Once you get into the IFR world and start looking not just at approach plates, but the review and updating process of each, the other maps that are produced, the real-time sitrep data that they're producing - it's really quite something what they've accomplished. And the world looks to FAA for its lead in aviation. We were the first to pioneer powered fixed wing flight, after all. I can only hope there's a way out of this.
The technology existed to at least help automate this decades ago.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the truck has a single radio (airplanes always have two) and was constantly switching between ATC and fire house frequencies. The probably never heard the "stop, stop, stop stop.."
It would also not surprise me if airports previously had dedicated fire services, which have since been outsourced for cost reasons.
Yes they are.
I read elsewhere that the plane was only going 24mph when it hit the truck, and I didn't understand how the collision could have been that damaging, but I wasn't taking into account how much momentum a plane would have at that speed. From the video, it seems like a plane moving on the ground acts less like a car or truck and more like a very delicate freight train when it hits something.
I'm not completely sure but it seems like the runway entry lights are red which very clearly indicates the runway is in use. They should have known better.
You seem confident and well-informed. Can you tell us about the time of day, visibility conditions, and what it’s like driving a fire truck at an airport? We should really get this judgment to the driver ASAP.
> It would have prevented this.
Wow.
This is one of many examples of why capitalism needs to be kept in check with democratic government oversight. Sometimes the financial incentives are not high enough to warrant changing the system.
Not making light of this, but I imagine there is another story of the person who had some strange scented product that led the flight attendants to play it safe and phone it in. There may very be someone whose strong cologne or forgetfulness to leave a chemical at home resulted in 2 deaths :(
Anyone else think that if you're going on an airplane, you shouldn't be wearing cologne or perfume? Antiperspirant/deodorant, absolutely. But giving yourself a strong scent when you're going to spend a few hours tightly-packed with other people feels rude.
RTOs throw off a ton of energy: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/S6nZDGBPsak
> A fume event occurs when bleed air used for cabin pressurisation and air conditioning in a pressurised aircraft is contaminated by fluids such as engine oil, hydraulic fluid, anti-icing fluid, and other potentially hazardous chemicals.
https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2026-releases/2026-03-09-0...
On average, it was slightly worse globally, especially if you count fatalities (which were much worse).
If Tower had some help, maybe an AI or maybe another set of ears, the tragedy could have been avoided.
An LLM monitoring instructions could easily have identified the mistake and alerted the ATC in time to save the situation. There was plenty of time to correct the mistake.