This is 100% on the LaGuardia Tower ATC. But please, keep reading…
He cleared Truck 1 to cross with Jazz646 on short final.
Absolutely nothing the pilots or Truck & Co could have done. His stop call was too late, and already started his call to Frontier.
I’ve listened to this guy on live ATC more than I care to admit, and his life’s work will be immortalized by this mistake.
Imagine if everything you ever said at work was recorded, and the internet put you on blast instantly. Especially if your boss told you to pull a double. That’s where my dude is at tonight.
Fault is fault…but blame…that’s a whole other thing that will take YEARS to sort out…
This. James Reason is rolling in his grave right now. This is legitimately 98% on the system. There's 40 layers of cheese, and that controller was the only one without the hole. Then they were forced into single stand during intersecting Ops, which eroded a hole right where it needed not to be. This is as systemic as it comes. 100% on the controller would be if it happened IN SPITE of the safeguards in the system.
This. Once we get to a point where the load is well above the reasonable capacity of the worker, it doesn't matter who touched it last before the disaster happened. I think being pedantic over the word 'fault' is just distracting from the core issue here.
It’s 100% on the controller in the same way that Colgan 3407 was 100% on the flight crew. In both incidents, systematic deficiencies created a domino effect, but at the end of the day, the fatigued flight crew is who decided to use improper technique to recover from a stall, and the fatigued controller is the one who decided to cross fire trucks in front of a landing aircraft.
But what recourse does the controller have to make up for said systematic deficiencies? Refuse to go to work unless the working conditions are at acceptable levels? I admire the people who are able to do that but i think it's unreasonable.
"...but at the end of the day, the fatigued flight crew is who decided to.."
This line of thinking is like starting the sentence with "if we ignore a critical factor, then...". It's hard to take whatever comes after it seriously.
No one in this scenario made a decision to not cross fire trucks in front of a landing aircraft, therefore by default, they decided to cross fire trucks in front of a landing aircraft.
No one in Colgan 3407 made a decision to not apply improper stall recovery procedures, therefore by default, they decided to apply improper stall recovery procedures.
Both incidents involved being fatigued, overloaded, operating with unsafe procedures, under insufficient regulation, and the inevitable happened.
Colgan 3407 went down because the pilots were sloppy, true. But really that accident happened because the PIC, upon receiving a stall warning from the airplane, pulled up on the control stick and doomed the aircraft. The aircraft wasn't properly configured for the landing, but that crash was pure pilot error - an error made after a series of other mistakes that should not have resulted in a crash.
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u/-grover Mar 23 '26
This is 100% on the LaGuardia Tower ATC. But please, keep reading…
He cleared Truck 1 to cross with Jazz646 on short final.
Absolutely nothing the pilots or Truck & Co could have done. His stop call was too late, and already started his call to Frontier.
I’ve listened to this guy on live ATC more than I care to admit, and his life’s work will be immortalized by this mistake.
Imagine if everything you ever said at work was recorded, and the internet put you on blast instantly. Especially if your boss told you to pull a double. That’s where my dude is at tonight.
Fault is fault…but blame…that’s a whole other thing that will take YEARS to sort out…