https://www.airlinepilotforums.com
You will see many are terrified ( in commercial pilot terms...) of flying into La Guardia or JFK...
Just a quick read/speculation based on the linked forum post...
Short of insane visibility conditions that prevented them from seeing the plane coming, the firetruck operator seems to be the liable party (beyond the airport for understaffing controllers—this seems to be exacerbated by government cuts but that's still no excuse for having a solo controller at that busy of an airport, especially at night).
The controller in question seems to have caught their mistake quickly and reversed the order instead asking the firetruck to stop (but for some reason, this wasn't heard).
Is it common now to have solo operators running control towers?
AC No: 150/5210-20A - "Subject: Ground Vehicle Operations to include Taxiing or Towing an Aircraft on Airports"
https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/...
“you must ensure that you look both ways down the runway to visually acquire aircraft landing or departing even if you have a clearance to cross.”
These trucks seem to have pretty good visibility from inside. Not sure if La Guardia model was the same: https://youtu.be/rfILwYo3sXc
Says at pag 9:
"While driving on an aerodrome : Clear left, ahead, above and right
Scan the full length of the runway and the approaches for possible landing aircraft before entering or crossing any runway, even if you have received a clearance."
They have mostly glass cabs for exactly that reason. Only thing that would block your view is a passenger in the right seat.
But if your truck has blind spots and vis is poor, you shouldn't be driving as fast if at all.
We can’t say that emergency vehicles should just stay in on dark and stormy nights.
..is what I was responding to.
>We can’t say that emergency vehicles should just stay in on dark and stormy nights.
This conclusion is flawed and doesn't apply to what I said.
If a truck can't see (conditions or not), then they shouldn't be on the same runway as takeoff/landing because...the consequences were severe despite the safeguards you mentioned, e.g. Not driving fast is relative and the "eyes" failed too initially.
Almost every airplane is bigger, blinder and slower than that truck. If it had been a plane cleared across the runway, this would have been so much worse.
Even if you want to exempt airplanes, it would require a complete rebuild of most major airports or using completely different emergency equipment. Every airport you have ever flown to commercially has ground vehicles crossing or operating on runways every day. It is simply not possible to operate a commercial airport without ground vehicles in aircraft movement areas, including runways.
The solution is not to spend billions on new trucks or access roads because of a single incident. It is to ensure that controllers, the people directly in charge of coordinating safe ground movement, have the mental bandwidth and tools to do their jobs. The fact that this was a truck and not an airplane is luck, making any discussions about truck cab visibility very much secondary. You have to go upstream of “trucks have blind spots” to truly prevent another of these incidents.
I never said this. This is very different to what I said.
This reveals you're having a different conversation.
All of my arguments apply to this statement as well as they do to my paraphrase of the statement.
What?
It doesn't work like that unless you're having a different conversation.
How do you propose that a truck not driving “at all” manage to drive on the runway? Driving on the runway, (or anywhere) is a subset of driving “at all”. Logically I can conclude that since you think that the trucks should not be driving “at all” due to blind spots, that you also think that they should not be driving on runways because of blind spots.
My argument paraphrased you to highlight a specific situation that would arise as a result of what you argued and to point out the folly of just banning any vehicle with a blind spot from crossing the runway. By extension, that planes can’t cross the runway either (the difference between a fire truck and an airplane crossing the runway is that the plane is larger, with bigger blind spots, less maneuverable, fragile and filled with people).
The solution is not to ban vehicles with blind spots from crossing runways, but to provide tools and guidance for those vehicles to operate safely. You could, for example, provide them with a trained observer in an elevated place that can be responsible for saying whether it is ok to be on the runway. We could give the person coordinating movement in the elevated place tools like radar mapping the ground, or automated semaphore systems at runway crossings (I’m describing things that already exist). Using a system like that we could do things like operate in 0 visibility where the weather causes the blind spot to be anything past the windshield (which is something that happens at JFK for example).
The rest of the emergency vehicles were stopped because they hadn’t been authorized. Truck 1 started moving because he had received specific instructions to do exactly what he was doing.
I take it you’re not a pilot, controller or someone who has ever worked an aviation radio?
Edit: Confirmed truck 1 was the one involved in the collision. Previous text: It is unclear which truck specifically was involved in the crash. In photos, the truck has the number 35 on it, not sure if that would preclude it from being identified as "truck 1" verbally.
In any case, if they were cleared across the runway, and they were, it isn’t really on them. It doesn’t change the gist of the argument. The broader point is that it wasn’t that one truck was barreling around being reckless as implied by gp, it’s just that one truck made it out and the rest of the company had yet to start moving (whether because they saw the plane coming from their viewpoint farther back, or just hadn’t started moving yet, we will find out later). The entire company had stopped at the line, and when cleared across the lead truck was struck. Of course the rest were still stopped behind the line, there was a giant fire truck in their path moments before.
The instruction to stop is, to my pilots ear, irrelevant. Until an instruction is read back by the receiving party, it is worthless. It might not have been received, or received incorrectly. That’s the whole point of the readback, to ensure that the instruction was received correctly (notice how I missed the “and company”… a readback would have caught that). If there is not a readback, controllers are instructed to ask for one. On top of that, it was a panic instruction using non standard verbiage. If he was already past the line, the instruction to stop might have made it worse.
All people (pilots included) are responsible for only following ATC instructions if it is safe/possible to do so. You aren’t supposed to land on a runway with other traffic on it, even if cleared. You aren’t supposed to cross a runway if there is a plane taking off or landing, even if cleared. You aren’t supposed to clear a vehicle onto a runway at the same time you cleared a plane to land (this one’s an assumption, I’m not a trained controller).
You are making the assumption that the truck did not check the runway, but keep in mind that it is a 30ish ton vehicle, and the plane was moving at 150 mph at touchdown, 100 mph at the time of impact. There very well may not have been a plane visible when the truck started moving. The truck might not have received the non-standard clearance revocation, or received it and tried to get off the runway by accelerating across, or received it and begun slowing in the path of the plane.
The truck driver could have prevented this, but they certainly aren’t the primary cause.
At Class D airports it’s always been the norm. But KLGA is Class B.
The fire truck received the go ahead. They weigh 3x more than a normal firetruck. They're rushing to a different emergency. The plane is moving fast as hell. They can't just react instantaneously.
The ATC worker is clearly too stretched and such an incident was an inevitability. When they're shouting stop, they are no longer directly talking to the firetruck, which obscures the situation for everyone.
It is a terrible tragedy that will only be prevented with reform in staffing and safety procedures.
We aren’t in the aviation industry, and neither are we the NTSB.
Prosecutions and convictions do occur as a result of aviation incidents, pilots loose their jobs, pilots loose their licenses, ATC staff can be prohibited from ever working in the industry again.
We free to talk about all of those aspects here.
What government cuts? 2025 FAA air traffic budget was up around 7% from 2025
https://enotrans.org/article/senate-bill-oks-27-billion-faa-...
> The crash has raised fears that operations at US airports are under extreme stress. Airports have been dealing with a shortage of air traffic controllers, exacerbated by brutal federal government personnel cuts by Donald Trump’s administration at the start of his second presidency.
Not my opinion, just reading from there.
I'm just looking for: budget was X in <2026 and in 2026 it is Y, where X > Y
Also first time ATC told the truck to stop it wasn’t too clear who the message was addressed to. It’s a bit hard to hear “Truck1” there, not clear who he wants to stop. The second time, one can argue by the time “stop” command was heard it might have been better to gun the engine. As the truck sort of slowed down in the middle of the runway.
Just like in that collision, it is possible there is no one single person to blame (apparently helicopter pilot was not outside of the legal corridor, despite the speculations), but it was a compounding error issue.