It is possible for ATC to be understaffed as a profession, LGA to be understaffed as an airport, individual controllers to be overworked, and for it to be 100% reasonable to have a single controller at LGA in the middle of the night.
In general, I can. In LaGuardia? Aside from right after 9/11 and during COVID-19 when almost all commercial travel stopped, I cannot.
I don't think people saying this stuff quite understand how busy LGA is even at night. I'd even go as far as to say that three minimum on duty with two in the tower at all times (for a ground/air split), would be the bare minimum for any hour or situation at LGA.
It does quiet down eventually. There's no scheduled departures 22:55-5:45 and only a handful of arrivals 23:59-6:45.
However, arrivals stay pretty heavy right up until 23:59 even on schedule and if you've got a lot of delayed flights (not exactly uncommon at LGA) - you may still have a lot of departures going out in the 23:00 hour.
I would not be surprised to learn that they're staffed to an appropriate level for what the schedule says is supposed to be operating at that time, but a very inadequate level for what actually winds up operating at that time on many days.
Initial analysis suggests they were running about 75% of full capacity in flight ops in the 15min prior to the accident. I doubt they were staffed to 75% of the daytime peak.
When the airport is closed, in case there was an emergency that needed to reroute. One person on then makes sense?
La Guardia appears to handle 400 flights a day, 22 an hour. I see 6 moving planes right now (https://www.flightradar24.com/airport/lga); hopefully they have more than one person on?
400 flights a day is 16-17 per hour and those are going to be mostly during the day. As someone else points out there is a ~6 hour stretch overnight with no scheduled departures. That's somewhat common even at large hubs.
I don't want to blow your mind but if the airport closes there aren't going to be any controllers in the tower.
You're 100% right, a "Trump-friendly" administrator has been "installed" so we can't trust the FAA's conclusions. The last guy quit so this guy is definitely going to lie.
I don’t have time to check flight logs but I personally landed at LGA coming from MDW on Sunday. And I also know people who got diverted within the hour coming back to LGA that night. 30-40 minutes doesn’t seem accurate. That aside, if you’ve ever done operational staffing, you’d know that you should probably have at least one redundancy. When there is any chance of emergency or two events happening simultaneously, you should have more than one person.
One last meta point. We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and the highest air travel prices (some part is a function of longer distances I know). We should expect that we have ample coverage, if not over-coverage, at all times for one of our major metropolitan airports. Pay them.
12am-5am is very quiet, at about 1 per hour. But the accident happened during the 10pm-12am time slot, which is not as busy as other times of day, but can still have workload spikes as evidenced by this situation.
In this case there were two arrivals within 4 minutes of each other and two departures, in addition to the emergency plane that had just aborted takeoff.
Which is a completely reasonable amount of traffic for one controller to handle. This wasn't the controller's fault. The firetruck received a clearance, had that clearance revoked, and either didn't hear the revocation or ignored it.
If you have ever spent time listening to LiveATC you will realize that like everyone, "tunnel ear" is a real thing - if United 1002 has received the clearance/instructions they expect, read them back, and are proceeding it can be moderately difficult to get their attention again, even with perfect verbiage.
The controller was not guilty of malfeasance, but clearing the trucks onto the runway with an airliner on short final was a mistake, no matter whatever else one could say about it.
Same as if the radios stopped working or otherwise communication fails. Execute the planned procedures (which vary).
Often Approach will take over the "tower" and operate in crippled mode (no clearances to cross active runways, you must go down to the end kind of thing).
Some airports are uncontrolled at various times and would revert to that. Some airlines would require the pilot execute a missed approach and deviate to a towered airport, others may allow them to land.
Approximately one per minute in the 15 minute span proceeding this crash, including one that had an emergency takeoff rejection and was being maneuvered along with the emergency support vehicles that were being sent to attend to it
"Funny" enough if this controller had had a medical emergency (or just bad sushi) and been off the radios, this wouldn't have happened because the fire truck would not have received clearance to cross the runway and wouldn't have. Or at least would have crossed like the airport was uncontrolled, been much more careful and announced itself, and likely have seen the landing aircraft.
And if an aircraft needs to land due to an emergency? It’s amazing things work as well as they do, the system relies on only one thing going wrong at a time. This accident was an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time.
Every accident is an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time.[0]
I'm going to pretend to know exactly what would happen in that precise scenario but I'm confident most commercial pilots get enough training to be able to handle it.
>> Every accident is an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time.
You are defeating your own argument :-) Its exactly because every accident is an example of multiple things going wrong at the same time...that you need...multiple layers of control and safety to catch it through each hole of the cheese.
One of the things you learn as a pilot is how to recognize that you need to go into emergency mode if you will. Call it high-alert if you want.
You need to recognize when something is out of the ordinary and treat it as an emergency (perhaps not a literal pan-pan/mayday emergency) sooner rather than later, and do things that may end up to have been unnecessary (like executing a go-around because emergency vehicles were on the move).
One controller on two frequencies is another example - that works fine in normal situations, but during an emergency response, perhaps the channels should be mixed; giving the pilots in the air a chance to hear the incorrect clearance onto their runway.
After all, an active runway is really more of an "air" control thing than a ground one.
An empty tower at La Guardia with a bunch of airplanes in the air not getting a reply to their calls is Die Hard 2 stuff. Spare me the Pete Hegseth school of ATC...
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The GP is literally about a lone controller in the tower having a medical episode and what would happen after that.
The pilots would execute untowered approach procedures, a small airport with little to no traffic and VFR flight you may self-announce on frequency, a larger airport you go back to approach, etc.
Each of those flights should have an alternate and be prepared (have enough fuel) to divert. If there is a fuel emergency then self-announcing is likely appropriate as the plane is coming down anyway, but that is multiple things going wrong.
A big part of it is what category of airport it is, and plane. General aviation almost always goes to self-announce (which includes some business jets perhaps, they often land at untowered airports) but not category 135 air travel or whatever it is.
You should try harder, because I'm not making any comment on regulation whatsoever. There are procedures that every controller and pilot knows for how to handle loss of radio contact.
There are millions of people who are self employed in an industry where they could be maimed or killed if they screw up who manage to make it to retirement.
I think the better question is how you get a system in which people are only responsible for any one facet to get the same performance out of people that a painter can get out of himself when he's setting up his own ladder that he personally has to climb on.
I don't think the GPs point is about personal safety of workers, but rather critical safety systems that rely on one person with no backups. Like an ATC tower for a busy airport staffed by a single person on an overnight shift.
A painter who does a bad job setting up a ladder is going to have a bad time, a lone ATC operator having a heart attack potentially puts multiple large aircraft full of people in danger...
Normally? Zero. LGA has a curfew from midnight to six AM, April 5-December 31.
In practice? It depends. Delays have a tendency to cascade in the air travel system and the Port Authority can curtail or cancel the curfew at their discretion. How frequently do exceptions to normal ops have to happen for it to be unreasonable to use "normal ops traffic" as a justification for scheduling a single controller? Ultimately, controllers have to control the traffic that they get, not the traffic that they want/expect to get, and a system that is overly optimized becomes brittle and unable to deal with exceptions to the norm.
Looking at the things he needs to juggle at the same time, is it really reasonable? Any standard we are referring here? Sure such cases are rare but that's why we have redundancies for critical positions.
> One controller overnight is completely reasonable.
Do you really think it's appropriate to have zero margin for handling unusually high ATC workloads? Because we just saw what happens when you have zero margin for handling unusually high ATC workloads: people start dying.
Yes, it's complicated. There's almost 1,000 generals and officers spread across the US military. They (and the tens of thousands of people directly supporting them) spend a lot of time on these things.
Sometimes "draw the rest of the owl" makes sense when you've got 20,000 people actively drawing owls all day every day.
I'm generally sympathetic to the argument that there are a lot of experts doing expert things who know better about these things than some idiot sitting at his computer i.e. me.
But in this particular case, we're in the middle of a war where the owl didn't get drawn and the enemy has successfully launched thousands of drones and missiles at our forces and our allies, causing enough damage to severely disrupt the world economy.
I don't know the economic numbers off the top of my head but I have to imagine it's hard to find Israelis who think they're spending too much money on rocket interceptors.
> If your million-dollar interceptor protects a multi-million-dollar building from a $100 missile, and then that building is hit by a second $100 missile, was it worth it?
I mean the assumption is that if the first missile hit the building, the second missile would have been fired at something else, right? Still seems worth it at face value especially if there's enough time between the two missiles that there aren't people in the building anymore.
My assumption would be that the attacker builds missiles based on the defenses they want to defeat. If you have no defenses, maybe the defender builds 1,000 missiles. If you have 1,000 interceptors with 100% accuracy, then maybe the defender builds 2,000 missiles.
This is why the superpowers mostly scrapped their ICBM defenses in the 70s. The technology worked fine. It's totally doable with 1970s technology if you're willing to put nuclear warheads on the interceptors. But for every ICBM interceptor you built, the other side could build another ICBM for the same cost or less. And you need more than one interceptor per ICBM since they can fail and the each interceptor only covers a small area. Add in multiple warheads on a single missile and decoys and suddenly you might need 10x or more. So the USA gave up on the idea of covering the entire country with interceptors, deployed a few interceptors to protect some missile silos, then shut it down after less than a year. The USSR built out a system to protect Moscow and only Moscow, which is still operational today. However, the British were able to maintain the ability to defeat that system and destroy Moscow with a single submarine, all on their own, never mind what the USA would throw at it.
If you have a certain amount of stuff you can build and you're deciding what to do with that capacity, it's not at all clear that missile interceptors are a good use of that capacity even if you're protecting objects that cost orders of magnitude more than the interceptors cost. It works if you're defending against a far less capable adversary (Israel's Iron Dome against Hamas, USA's GBI system against North Korea) but not with an enemy that's even vaguely close to being a peer.
That worked in 1970 because there were exactly two players who had incentive to not spend all the money so they agreed to reduce the total ICBMs instead. In the current world there are too many actors - it won't work, they can make thousands of missles. Ukraine has already proven you don't get to control when you are attacked. Thus the only option today is cost reduce defense and produce enough to intercept several thousand per day.
It doesn't matter if it's the only option if it's not possible to do it.
Maybe it is possible. It does seem like it may be possible to defend against cheap drones with cheaper systems. Use lasers or good old-fashioned projectile guns instead of interceptor missiles.
For defending against proper missiles, I don't see how it's possible with any near-future tech. Guns and lasers don't work. You have to use a missile and it's going to have a cost similar to the cost of what you're shooting down. Peer enemies will be able to out-build you and many missiles will get through your defenses.
Shooting some down is better than shooting none down, but your enemy won't ignore your defensive systems. Shooting down 1,000 and having 1,000 get through is not better than shooting down 0 and having 1,000 get through. If building defenses just provokes the other side to build more offense, it's not worth it. If they're going to build the same amount of offense either way, then it might make sense to build up defenses.
Here's something to consider. The US has interceptors capable of shooting down ICBMs and with enough range to protect the whole continental US. There are currently 44 such interceptors. They cost about $75 million each. Standard procedure is to shoot four interceptors at an incoming missile to increase the likelihood of a kill, so that's about $300 million per incoming missile you want to counter. That's very much worth the cost if it prevents a nuclear warhead from reaching its target.
Russia and China together have maybe 700 ICBMs if we take a high estimate. For $210 billion, we could have enough interceptors to shoot down almost all of them. Round it up to $300 billion to account for all the infrastructure they'd need. That's a bargain compared to saving hundreds of American cities. So the question is: should we do it? So far, the American government has said "no." I agree with them, despite it being a bargain. Do you?
The missiles on the UK's nuclear missile submarines were fitted with decoys. One of the three warheads carried by each missile was replaced with a dispenser that would deploy 27 decoys. A single submarine carried 16 missiles, so it could launch 32 warheads and 400+ decoys at Moscow. The Moscow defenses had 100 interceptors, so it was pretty much guaranteed that at least one warhead would make it through.
More recently, they upgraded to newer missiles which could carry 8 warheads each, allowing them to overwhelm Moscow's defenses without decoys.
A trillion seems large but it's not that absurd. The drone that shut down 17% of Qatar's LNG capacity is said to have caused 20 billion USD worth of annual lost revenue. They said it'll take up to 5 years to rebuild so that could be 100 billion USD in lost revenue, plus whatever it costs to do the rebuild.
A trillion dollars worth of damage seems possible if spread over some years for some countries in the Gulf where shutting down a desalination plant would cause depopulation.
that could be 100 billion USD in deferred revenue, if we assume that LNG is not going anywhere from wherever it's sitting underground, and will be simply extracted and sold later
> plus whatever it costs to do the rebuild
That is the real cost, which I would assume is nowhere near billions
> that could be 100 billion USD in deferred revenue, if we assume that LNG is not going anywhere from wherever it's sitting underground, and will be simply extracted and sold later
I don't think anyone should have any concern whatsoever regarding Qatar revenues vs. Qatar budgets, as they are nowhere near bankruptcy, with this setback or without. Their position by projected GDP per capita may decrease from 6th (currently) to maybe 10th place in the world, which is still better than about 180 other countries.
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