Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia

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.

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.

> If an Air Traffic Control clearance is in conflict with the Runway Entrance Lights, do not cross over the red lights. Contact Air Traffic Control and advise that you are stopped due to red lights. (ex.: "Orlando Ground, Ops 2 is holding short of runway 36 Left at Echo due to red lights").

Airports are highly controlled environments unlike typical motor vehicle roadways and generally the same rules apply for aircraft, vehicles, and equipment on airport surface movement areas. From all sources I can find, if the RWSLs were working they should have been red and nobody should have entered the runway without further clarification from ATC.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl

However that is not permissible here. Airplanes are similar to trains, you have to stop and wait and there are no exceptions.

I read a theory that there's only one radio in the truck that needs to be switched between frequencies.

Presumably the truck driver got clearance from the tower then immediately switched away to the frequency that the firefighters use to coordinate.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen

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.

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

Digital comms is available in the US:

* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/DataComm

The issue is that the final approach and landing (and taxiing?) environments are probably too dynamic for that: in this particular situation one of the vehicles was responding to an emergency (fire).

In addition to huge planes, there is baggage transportation, passenger buses (to mid-field terminals), fuel pumpers, emergency vehicles, snow plows, deicers, and general maintenance vehicles (clear debris off runways).

I would settle for a good digital system with an ability to issue emergency/priority calls to specific receivers. Oh, and full-duplex communication.

I'm practicing for a sports pilot license, and I really have problems with understanding other pilots and the ATC.

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.

In my job we work 40h a week + oncall rotating. It works.

I wrote this 12 years ago and it's even more true today: https://magarshak.com/blog/stop-wasting-our-time/

I'm Australian. In Australia, if you are forced to work overtime the rate of pay goes up, by 50% or if it's extreme, double. As a consequence "underpaid" isn't a common complaint of people working lots of overtime.

This has some negative consequences of course. If labour is plentiful you can have lots of people on hand and pay them on an hours-worked basis. The same deal applies - if you go beyond 40 hours a week their rate of pay goes up, but that shouldn't happen if labour is plentiful and management is on the ball.

But if, as in this case labour isn't plentiful, then they are going to have to fix it some other way - like paying to train more staff. What the employers can't do is offload the problem entirely onto their employees, so there are forces compelling them to get their act together.

The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US.

It’s analogous to this hypothetical conversation:

“XYZ Politician is a corrupt official who needs to be investigated”

“Well actually, corruption is everywhere.”

See how that downplays and changes the subject at hand?

Not everyone is overworked and underpaid like ATC workers. The US government needs to implement real reforms to rectify that situation.

Instead, you find that this critcal mass is happy being boiled with their eyes wide shut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

The pilot was given the clearance to land before the fire engine was dispatched. Apparently there was not even enough time for the crew to max out the thrust and try to lift off the strip even if they managed to notice the lights of the incoming fire engine.

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.

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.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/

One controller working tower duties, ground movement duties, coordinating with other ATC functions off the radio, an active emergency request, and giving clearance amendments all within 2 minutes. It's insane understaffing. On top of it, there was nobody there to take over after the crash. He worked the whole cleanup for the next 30 minutes.

This is an Olympian level elite Air Traffic Controller who was setup to fail.

I've visited towers, center facilities, and have flying (and some instructing) in the San Francisco airspace for 10 years. That kind of failure is systemic way above an individual.

The money doesn't somehow make it sustainable for the people burning out their lives. Working 7 days a week, including overnight shifts, for 20 years to collect a pension seems like WELL earned compensation.

That's seems unrelated to "we have so few" and "we enmiserate the one's we do have".

You can still do contract ATC work after 56.

You can’t account for overtime in pensions because the employees will conspire to force overtime for retiring employees to bounce the pension up. Just a natural risk with an entity that can’t go bankrupt hiring people.

Hard disagree. The ATC initially cleared them to cross the runway. The truck started moving, and just then the ATC realised that they made a mistake and tried to fix it. Even their first attempt at that was unclear, and they only clarified who should stop on the second attempt.

People can’t react in zero second, trucks don’t stop immediately. The ATC mistake was clearing them to cross the runway, whatever happened after was out of their hands.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-begins-firings-o...

The real issue is just insufficient slots.

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.

This is a REALLY hard problem that the US cannot solve alone. It would require extensive global coordination.

Not insurmountable, but this is not something you can easily roll out piecemeal. If even a single aircraft lacks the compatible equipment you're back to the existing system.

Which has always seemed a little nuts, like in case of hit and run it would definitely be possible to take action based on a plate alone, both for police and insurance purposes. Unless the registered owner can point to the not-them person who was driving their car at that time, then it was them. Or it was stolen, but either way there will be a clear paper trail.

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.

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.

Understaffing is absolutely a factor. Had tower and ground not been combined, the erroneous clearance probably wouldn't have been issued.

The ARFF truck not complying with the stop instruction is absolutely a factor. Had they heard and complied, the accident wouldn't have happened.

And there are likely additional factors that will come out in the investigation.

I recommend reading some final aviation accident reports from the NTSB to learn more about how these investigations proceed and what kinds of conclusions and recommendations they include.

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!

I highly doubt that any system would intentionally give ground vehicles of any kind special treatment on an active runway.

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

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.

Looks like more flights in 2025 than previous years and less accidents. 2025 does have more fatalities, which are more memorable than emergency landings where everything was alright. So that is likely what skewed my view.

Air Traffic Control staffing shortages. This has led to long shifts and intensive workloads for controllers, increasing the risk of errors.

Government shutdowns have exacerbated these shortages, causing delays and heightening safety risks as critical personnel, including TSA and safety technicians, were furloughed or worked without pay.

Then there’s the outdated infrastructure. The U.S. National Airspace System relies on aging radar and communication technology.

IMO is a combination of events. I think Covid stopping all flights for so long caused some permanent loss of institutional system knowledge, and we've never recovered from it since.

On top of that, the US has been having more and more shutdowns - and regardless of whether you like him or not, Trump's been responsible for some of the longest ones.

The impact of extra mental stress on people who're already in one of the most stressful jobs in the world cannot be good in any way I can think of.

I think the fact that we're not seeing so many issues in Germany or Singapore or Dubai makes me suspect that this is a bit more US specific than global. Some issues (eg Covid) are common, but an alert pilots can overcome eg a mistaken ATC. But the more things/conditions that go wrong, the likelier it is that the Swiss cheesehole misses and causes an error.

Richard Cook's How Complex Systems Fail is an interesting read if you're curious for more.

To clarify - I'm not minimising the fucked up nature of the event. I'm just saying it's still thankfully a rare occurrence.

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.

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.

I think you'd be surprised. The cab is quite solid because it has to conform to certain vehicle design and safety criteria (at least here in Europe).

The rest of it is made of fairly squashy aluminium box section with panels TIG welded on. There's not a lot left if one of them gets rolled, for example.

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.

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

> 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.”