The trajectory of the plane is obvious enough that it should be able to predict where it will likely be in 30 seconds or a minute. You can't cheat physics, if it is going down in direction of runway, it is landing or at worst will do go-around, so the services should be alterted runway is no-go automatically

> 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.

Planes typically have their center of gravity just forward of the rear wheels. This makes it easier to rotate on takeoff.

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.

It's balance, you don't need a large difference in weight for it to tilt backwards.

I’d guess the front landing gear assembly is going to be fairly heavy, and appears to be missing. This model of plane also has its engines at the rear, not under the wing, which will move the balance to the back.

> Boeings simply disappeared from Europe

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.

Bullshit. Pretty much every airport that handles FAA Part 121 flights has dedicated firefighting apparatus and crews.

I have over 1,000 hours as PIC in the NY area alone, in all seasons and all weather, and I was in the region last night, awake when the accident happened. LGA was reporting 4SM -RA BR FEW045 BKN090 OVC110 at the time of the accident. The weather wasn't anywhere close to what I'd call "bad" here. Sprinkles and some high clouds.

I can almost guarantee you the airplane was visible from taxiway D.

It’s obvious that either they didn’t, or they did but they didn’t see the plane. We don’t know which.

I could see that, yeah.

Why though? To report to the people who are asleep?

Because some of them still have standards. They will correct themselves if something was wrong.

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.

At the very least it’s worth reading to see what most people / the people in power are reading or want others to read.

The NYT is biased, but it’s still basically the most official newspaper of the American ruling class.

Why bother with the facts when you're already heard all the gossip?

If only we could diff the BBC article (it currently says it was posted 21 mins ago which is younger than your comment…). It’s changed multiple times now without any kind of changelog or acknowledgement.

> 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.”

How are fire trucks supposed to respond to incidents involving airplanes, as it appears this case involves, if the runway is off limits to them?

TCAS is fantastic - absolutely stellar example of effective automation.

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.

Voice communication can still be used for anything out of the ordinary despite automating the common case.

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.

Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.

Inadequate funding seems like the common factor across the vast majority of jobs with these failure modes.

Well, there was the time Ronald Reagan fired all the ATC workers because they were trying to unionize.

Not everyone. If you were friends with Epstein you got insider information and a victim to abuse.

As long as we're desperate for a job and we need to finance our lifestyle to impress the Johnsons.

The point of the frogs boiling metaphor is the frogs in fact do not survive.

There's exceptions all the time. They turn back because a warning light came on. They saw a deer on the runway, a passenger got up to the bathroom. There's no way that could be automatic, plus they often need atc to look at their jet to see if it's damaged.

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.

Imagine it were 90% automated. Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.

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.

Nowhere has automated ATC because errors look like this.

The problem is knowing before today how to handle the case where a ground vehicle isn't across the runway in those 30 seconds.

The FAA NextGen program has been running for literally decades. They have made some progress but there's a lot of work left to be done.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen

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All vehicles can override/ignore warning devices. Doesn't make it right. Emergency vehicles should not override/ignore train or plane crossings. Trains and Planes don't care about flashing lights. Crossing an active runway requires clearance for safety.

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.

Airport emergency services are presumably trained in this, but since a plane cannot stop easily (or not at all on takeoff after V1), I seem to remember the general rule is that even emergency vehicles with lights and sirens on give way to planes, and don't enter runways without permission from the tower.

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.

Literally called it “low hanging fruit”.

>> Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.

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.

with extremely controlled conditions. There is no fog in database, nor fallible humans involved, What an ignorant response

In a digitized environment. We cannot yet simulate the real world.

True. But to avoid 1 minute unavailability per year requires 99.9999 % availability

Yup, by having backup runways.

I'm pretty sure the amount of data isn't the problem here. Maybe it's the number of corner cases? You would still want some human-in-the loop with quality UI for ATC.

Changing the delivery method doesn't do anything to solve the problem of a controller sending an instruction that creates a hazard.

I’m not saying we couldn’t move more into automation. What I’m saying is that doing so will not solve all of our air/ground control problems. We still have human pilots and humans driving vehicles on the ground. Switching from humans directing landings to machines might improve some things but will not solve for all (and probably not most) risks.

Literally the crash here was caused by a fire truck entering the runway.

> Every time I've asked what's so hard about automating ATC

Why don’t you describe the hypothetical automation you believe would solve the problems then?

My hunch is that either your ideas are already implemented (like GP post who said they need to add red lights at the runway instances, except yeah, they do have that), or they are just bad.

> indignant sputtering and patronizing hand-waving.

Preemptively insulting everyone who might respond to you certainly looks like you’re asking for a real conversation. :|

Your accusation of “patronizing hand-waving” is especially off base considering you literally proposed nothing except “automating”. Hand waving indeed.

I worked in aviation in the late 1990s and automating ATC is all they could talk about. So, that's almost 30 years of talking and no action.

One jet landing every minute, coordinating the airspace for miles around the airport, along with coordinating non-landing traffic (helicopters, small craft), while making sure these (already heavily automated) flight systems dont get confused and kill several hundred people sounds easy to you, along with keeping everything on time and schedule?

Go write it then.

Of course it matters. All of these entities have limited budgets and personnel and almost unlimited ways they could apply those resources. They have to choose what to chase and they do that by deciding how big of a problem it is.

A CRJ 9000 is 70000 lbs empty, 84500 lbs MTOW.

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.

There’s a lot of ATC that isn’t specific to a single airport. And lots of airports are owned by a government anyway.

LaGuardia, like many (most?) airports, is run by the government. This is a distinction without a difference, at least in this case.

Yes. Reagan was a Republican.

No, I mean government. This has been a problem for a long time and there hasn't been any serious effort to improve the situation by anyone.

The shortage of ATC staff dates back to the Clinton Administration. It’s just hard to attract people into a 5+ year training program for a very stressful job where you might get bounced near the end with no payout and no transferrable job skills.

Specifically, Reagan made a point to cut our nose to spite our face just to not pay ATC workers more money. For political and Ideological reasons.

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!

Speaking very generally, it's not unusual at all. Tower and ground are combined all the time - at smaller airports.

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.

That seems unusual to me. It’s common at smaller airports, but for a big one like LaGuardia I’d think tower and ground would be two different controllers, even lateish at night like this was. I know there has been a staffing problem for controllers in the NY area for some time.

Reddit aviation groups are full of professional pilots, saying how terrified they of flying into La Guardia or JFK, recounting close calls, with one saying how he avoided those two for 10 years...

It IS insane. Specially for LGA

It's not unusual for airports to reduce staff at night, and the incident occurred at 23:36 local time. Even at a very large airport in a very busy traffic area, one controller can probably handle normal operations at this hour.

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.

As an informed person (PPL flying single engine into smallish towered airports all the time), it is absolutely insane for an airport the size of LGA. Occasionally, you will encounter one guy doing tower and ground at very small class D airports or during not-so-busy shifts.

I fly out of a small-to-medium-sized airport in Canada and I've never seen it happen there. The idea of one person being responsible for both tower and ground in the busiest airspace in the US is absolute insanity.

It's absolutely understaffing.

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