The LaGuardia Tragedy

What happened with the CRJ and the fire truck at LaGuardia was indeed a tragedy, and a preventable one. Not necessarily for the reasons many of the people trying to score political points off the blood of the tragedy are expounding though.

First, let set some basic terms and information that are needed to understand the situation. The FAA and the Transportation Administration control aviation in the U.S. You have flight control, which is the part of the operation that controls and monitors flights in progress. You have departure control which is concerned with takeoff and departure operations. You have landing control, which is responsible for the last part of the flight and landing. You then have ground control, which is responsible for general movement on the ground.

Depending on circumstances, these can all be different people (and some companies even have their own ops people at airports, such as caterers, cargo companies, etc) or they can all be one person. Depends on a number of factors, with the largest being the size of the airport and the amount of traffic. What a lot of people don’t like to talk about is that it also depends on staffing, which started to be an issue in the mid-2000s. There are actually several reasons (no matter what the yard signs say, there are few simplistic problems and no simplistic solutions) and they include training issues, technology issues, and workload.

A lot of this has been discussed in regards the DC crash (covered here, feel free to hit the search button). The technology of the Air Traffic Control (ATC) system is beyond antiquated, as are a number of the collision avoidance systems. In the wake of DC, there was a lot of talk about fixing that right now, and people like Elon and others who know tech volunteered to help. Haven’t heard a word about that since.

Would love an update on what’s being done, or not, and why. There are in fact straightforward solutions using Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technology that would vastly improve both flight control and approach/departure control. In the past, one of the biggest stumbling blocks was Congress, and some members of the bureaucracy, as such projects did not grease the right hands or flow to the right districts. It would be nice to get a DOGE (or a Data Republican) audit of all that has been pledged and spent on this from 2000 onwards since a lot of it just seems to me to have disappeared.

Congress has also been a huge problem with the staffing issue, particularly the Oklahoma delegation of Congresscritters. Right now, the FAA school for controllers is in Oklahoma; it can’t handle the load it has much less train the numbers of people needed; and, that delegation has blocked every effort to open other FAA schools elsewhere. Just a suggestion, but take your BP meds before you dig into this and other ways Congress has blocked pretty much all efforts to fix the staffing problem.

And it is a huge problem. Controllers, particularly approach/departure/ground, can find themselves working six days a week with mandatory overtime. Before passing judgement, or wallowing in the blood of the tragedy to make points for your side (what ever that may be) check out how long the controller in this case had been working. Check out the last time he had any realistic time off. Now, add in antiquated tech that hinders detection of problems rather than warning of them, and add in effectively what looks to be about three emergency/potential emergencies he’s juggling at once.

This is a life that just ended in most respects. The life he had is gone, and two people are dead and more injured because he was overworked and without help or support from his leadership including Congress. Pray for him, as he is going to need those prayers, even as you pray for the souls of the dead and for the injured. And before you jump on him or to make points, listen to the exchange afterwards, where he says he made a mistake (one he tried desperately to stop BTW) and is comforted by a pilot who told him he did the best he could. And he did, in a system that failed him, and us.

As with the DC crash there is plenty of blame to go around. My ire is focused a good bit on Congress, but more than one administration has not taken transportation, and reform/improvement of the FAA and ATC system seriously. I hope the current administration will take it seriously and that Sec. Duffy will step up and be the leader needed to meet this challenge. He talked good game after DC, and I would like to see some walk to go with the talk. If Congress or others are trying to play their usual games, let’s take the gloves off and do what’s needed before more are killed and more lives destroyed. Again, please do pray for that controller, he needs them.

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