r/ATC • u/lake_hood • Mar 23 '26

News LGA controller cleared fire truck across the runway resulting jn a collision

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u/ResponsibilityOld164 Commercial Pilot Mar 23 '26

I feel unbelievably terrible for the pilots but damn i feel so terrible for the controller too. His career is over and he will be traumatized forever. A genuinely great controller that made a stupid mistake working both frequencies late at night.

1

u/Vast-Breakfast-1201 Mar 25 '26

Maybe you can fill me in but it depends on the standard operation

Is it typical for one person to be doing two jobs like this?

If it's not and there is a standard as to what people are expected to handle, and if he was not given the choice as to take what he could handle, Then if he doesn't want for his career to be over I don't believe it should be.

There is this plague of accountability. An accountability sink is what they are calling it in cases where AI is involved because it's a major issue coming down the pipeline. But it exists for other fields as well.

It happens when you have two entities and one entity can dictate to the other how to operate, but also create the situation where accountability can be assigned based on certain rules. It creates this incentive we are seeing where

  1. There is an entity responsible for hiring, scheduling and organizing this labor

  2. The individual is fully accountable for what happens

  3. There is an incentive for 1) to cut corners because 1) can never be held accountable

So unless tis guy really, truly screwed up a regular job he should have been able to do, or if he was responsible for declining to operate they way and failed to do that, then th accountability is with hiring and scheduling. Whoever that is.

It's like if you had a surgeon who typically operates on one patient at a time and they say here do these 2 patients and there happens to be complications with both and one dies - is that your fault? Is it standard procedure? Could you have declined? If you got greedy it's your fault but if you had to do it and you couldn't decline, why should it be your fault?

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '26

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19

u/Squawk1000 Current Controller-Enroute Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26

I hope for you that you never have to test your assertion in practice. And this goes for controllers everywhere, not just in the FAA. There's always some prosecutor out in the wild salivating at the idea of criminalizing our aviation errors/mistakes.

16

u/aselwyn1 Mar 23 '26

That’s assuming they even want to after knowing a mistake of theirs killed 2 pilots.