In March 2026, we saw an Air Canada Jazz CRJ-900 collide with a fire truck at New York's LaGuardia Airport (LGA), claiming the lives of two pilots, and injuring dozens of others.
Well that's not good
Of course, the managers are not punished.
Then Secretary Duffy is an abuser as well for failure to solve the need for ATC overtime? Workers required to
serve overtime without compensation are slaves.
Won't solve. Tons will wash out. Plus they already reduced the staffing targets to make it look like we're better staffed than we are.
All that said, our staffing crisis is not *solely* Trump admin fault. Biden admin, Trump 1.0, Obama... things get worse under all of them. But Trump- as a hater of all feds- is definitely making things worse this time around in a much shorter timeframe.
That one hour difference could be the shift overlap ?
As a controller myself, the administration is (not surprisingly) trying to shift blame as far away from themselves as possible and find any scapegoats possible. They slashed staffing targets and won’t even give us our 2.8% “raise” because the administrator claims we don’t work enough. Yes the controllers shouldn’t have left, but unless they were paged/called back and they didnt respond then that obviously had NOTHING to do with the crash in any way.
The Trump family as a whole gave up earning hundreds of billions in favor of working for the good for the American people and in service of the American people and here you are complaining about a few percentages of pay increase.
Ungrateful
Ron gets it. Thank you for what you do. Hopefully LGA actually fixes the transponder issue (or lack thereof), soon, so incidents like this are less likely to ever happen again.
(JPlat, holy gish-gallop, Batman; is your 'source' OAN, or Newsmax this time? Ignore Trump’s crypto, etc. $2.2 billion in 2025; blame those pesky wage-earners instead! /s)
They left early.
Nobody will page you to comeback to work during your working hours.
You're supposed to still be there "working".
And if they got your 2.8% raise, would they still stay to the end of their shift?
These are issues with humans everywhere not exclusive to ATC. But most other jobs don't play with other people's lives.
Eskimo, sure, the FAA is definitely going to clean up those 'early shove' loopholes now, but treating a historically winked-at practice like it's the root cause of a runway disaster is absurd. It's like pulling over someone going 2 mph over the limit to ignore the broken infrastructure. The agency is just looking for scapegoats to distract from their failure to properly fund and staff our airspace.
Such an uneducated and stupid comment. Computers don't understand nuance and finesse.
@1990_: "Trolling" is just a lofty way of describing the juvenile behavior of negative attention seeking. Used to be reviled, but in today's society seems to be exhalted.
Given that he never seems to rebuke the relevant points (the most prominent one here being your remarks about algorithms making mistakes) in the discussion but continues to repeat his "obsolete" take anyways, negative attention seeking seems to be the most likely explanation.
@joepro Oh, the irony... I get accused of trolling, merely because I respond and engage frequently (albeit, nearly always on-topic), but I think it's usually by folks who merely disagree with whatever positions I'm taking (hopefully).
The obsolete JoeDinosaur is back. I thought you finally went extinct.
At least you're not trying to defend your colleagues and demand more pay this time. Do you leave an hour early too?
Can't see how a fossil can understand something beyond Mesozoic.
Computers talking to each other doesn't need or have nuance and finesse.
Like I keep saying, people stuck on the 1990_ hill can't visualize pass 2026.
More ad hominem junk from our dear friend. Unsurprising and reinforces my position regarding negative attention seeking.
For work, we have contracts with Amazon to do XYZ in fulfillment and distribution centers. I know ( purely casual talking / acquaintances ) that I would see consistently on my visits over a few years at one facility in the smoking area. Lovely people and always showed up for work and exceeded the output rate Amazon predetermined while consistently being in top 1 percent of productivity in a certain state.
They were fired and blacklist by Amazon for time card fraud because they would go smoke on unscheduled breaks ( their managers let them go outside since finished ) Let me say, this was also when their work was done and Amazon preferred them to stand at a station for hours doing absolutely nothing.
So Amazon lets employees sit on phones, eat and mingle at stations while working and screwing around ( violates all policies and termination for cause / unproductive / time card fraud ) and not hit your rate. But people get fired bc time card fraud for smoking after they completed 10 hours of work in 7 hours and it’s approved by their team manager.
Yes, not nearly same thing as FAA and peoples lives but time card fraud is rampant and happens. I can guarantee the person that fired A & B person engages in time card fraud in a way as well.
You do know that all those terminations were predetermined by head count and budget right?
Amazon just need a cause that even 1990_ propaganda unions can't even save them.
Ya don't need an Amazon warehouse conspiracy to see that ground vehicles should have transponders and controllers working 10-hour shifts 6 days a week is probably too much.
In 2013, 2014, and 2015 I worked 6-10's, every week, and racked up over 800 hours per year of MANDATORY overtime.
The day I turned 50, I retired. If I hadn't, I'd be dead right now.
This wasn't at some podunk facility. It was ATL.
Wow. Thank you for what you did, ATC. Hope you're enjoying retirement. Well deserved.
Thanks. I took a less stressful job a month after retirement, for 2 years, being an ATC instructor in Baghdad, Iraq.
Last time I checked Amazon moves more packages than USPS, FEDEX or UPS. So, it not conspiracy when I personally see it and these were people that DID THEIR JOB EFFECTIVELY.
If they were slackers and used system, they’d still be employed.
sunshine, you can keep pivoting to that flawed example, but you can't outsource air traffic control to the lowest bidder. When you run a skeleton crew into the ground with 800 hours of mandatory overtime a year, people burn out and safety margins disappear. We're talking about lives in the sky, not packages on a belt.
I thought it had to do with shift breaks? i.e the breaks are scheduled in a way that one would fall at the end of the shift, so you leave rather than sit in a break room for half an hour and then leave? I wouldn't call that fraud; maybe just bad policy to require breaks to not be deferred that long
What were the controllers scheduled hours that night? Did they leave before the end of those hours? If so, did they get supervisory approval to do so? Did they leave and still show as on the clock? Answer the questions before an opinion can be given.
Mornin', George. Yowzers, quite the strawman (and false binary) you're buildin' there. Even if the answer to every one of your questions is 'yes, they broke administrative policy and deserved to be fired for it,' it still has no bearing on the mechanical and communication failures that caused the actual runway collision. The firetrucks need transponders. The FAA need to hire, train, retain more controllers, upgrade other equipment. It all costs money. No one likes to pay for things. They wait for tragedy, then blame others. So, there. We good, now?
The transponders are a safety net and should be there but the accident was caused by an error of the controller.
Mike, gonna have to fix both if we're serious about preventing this from happening again. Properly fund both infrastructure and staffing.
Agree with George, as usual. I’m a former ATC (medium-busy tower). Shoves were always a thing, right or wrong. Always with tacit approval of supervisor on duty. Was there even a supervisor on duty, or merely a “controller in charge”. Whichever, if you’re going to start firing people to make examples of the behavior, you’d darn well better hire the supervisor as well.
JHS, if you're actually a former controller, you know full well that pinning this collision on a shift-change custom is a cop-out. Agreeing with George's rhetorical checklist (aka bad-faith insertion of plausible deniability) doesn't change the runway. Even if rules were bent, an early exit doesn't cause a blind truck crash... a lack of transponders and a broken system does. The solution is clear: properly fund infrastructure, equipment, and staffing. Mitigate risk. Save lives.
Obviously one controller below did not get the $10,000 bonus for working during the shutdown and all that person had to do was show up and DO their job. It is a job and you are paid well comparatively speaking. It’s a job, go find another cushy job that pays you as well and benefits without requiring you to be a business owner or formal education for college or graduate school. Cry me a river on 2.8 percent, sadly that’s our entitlement society. Raises are earned, not expected.
If you want a guaranteed raise. Go work in a state for minimum wage that is yearly increasing pay rates to hit a target pay. Oh, that’s also right in which you might be fired unexpectedly bc of guaranteed pay policies gored on employers.
So cry me a river on your cushy job, yes stressful…..but still cushy and it takes people being killed to possibly being fired. SAD.
Something, something, bootstraps. /s
Nothing screams 'I don't understand high-consequence jobs' like calling air traffic control 'cushy' and complaining about an 'entitlement society.'
Yeah, let's do as Sunshine says: 'go work minimum wage, if you want a raise.' *facepalm*
Something, something, bootstraps. /s
Nothing screams 'self entitlement' like using the excuse because I'm doing 'high-consequence jobs' *facepalm*
Tell me you know nothing about ATC without saying I know nothing about ATC.
All those controllers had to do was show up for 43 days in a row without getting paid I mean geez, what a bunch of slackers.
Or an algorithm that could work 43 years in a row without a single incident.
I mean geezer, what a bunch of dinosaurs.
We already use algorithms for many things, and they make mistakes all the time. At best, they're tools, not our replacements.
Well AI is smarter than most and will already be smarter and smarter.
If you can’t work 43 days and guaranteed your wages back on 100k job, look in mirror on spending. Creditors or landlords will work with you if you talk to them.
They got all pay.
1990 is perfect NSA. But still want cake eat it too. Try being in a position on a job where you are uncertain or bills to pay. Then complain. And I bet you pay lowest taxes you can while championing for etc.
Donate half your net worth to any charity. I will personally match it in whatever name you’d like or another cause. And that also includes anything you may have in a trust or two. Or offshore.
Some part of what "doesn't make sense", makes sense.
As written, this is a highly understaffed workplace. And it's already a job where a high level of concentration and alertness is required to avoid accidents and incidents. Any accident or incident can have severe consequences. People can only concentrate for so long before they start getting tired, and that happens faster when there's a lot of stress involved as well. Nothing is as dangerous as a tired ATC who doesn't respond swift enough or who makes mistakes due to fatigue. I'd rather see them go home and recharge for their new shift than staying an hour longer and screw up.
Having that said, the real problem is that the Trump administration still hasn't fixed the long time ATC shortages, but rather blames and punishes those who are still at work, calling them 'unpatriotic' (as if that has anything to do with it). It's again a deflecting pool of poor decisions.
I've worked a job where precision, alertness and concentration were required to avoid accidents and millions in losses. If we were exhausted, we were simply told to go home. If we were sick, we were simply told to stay away. And that place didn't even have staffing issues to add to the stress.
You know who doesn't leave early?
Computers.
Time to remove human error from problem.
Retire all obsolete humans.
Two Canadian Pilots are still dead. Phrase it any way you want. The comments continue to fight the Democrats vs Republicans civil war. How do you think the families feel? How do the two controllers feel knowing that if they had stayed around the pilots might still be alive? People around the world are dying while Americans fight over money and power.
The pilots (Captain Antoine Forest and First Officer Mackenzie Gunther) were indeed heroic. Their selfless final actions saved those passengers and the flight attendants lives. No one should minimize that human cost. If we want to honor them, we should invest in the infrastructure and people that can ensure this hopefully never happens anywhere ever again, such as mandating transponders on all ground vehicles and actually staffing (hiring, training, paying, all the above.) our towers properly so safety doesn't rely on luck. (Everything else is deflection, distraction.)
If you really want to honor them 1990_, then they should be removed from the cockpit, along side ATC forever.
Let no more human lives lost in commercial aviation to human error ever again.
Oh, Eskimo. If my 'hill to die on' is an EU261 equivalent in the US, I presume, this is yours (robots/computers, not people as pilots/ATC). Relatedly, I've been following the World Humanoid Robot Games; I just don't think we're ready for that yet. Anything's possible, though.
You're exactly the example why people don't get it. This isn't the hill I die on. I got murdered on the hill because people stuck on the 1960 hill can't visualize pass 2026. (Where's Proximanova when you actually want him)
You still think and expect computers to be humanoid i.e. mimic human.
Their current processors have evolved pass so many human inefficiencies and errors.
The problem of the humanoid games is humans are forcing computers to be humans.
When you're using your iPhone calculator, it doesn't need to artificially imagine fingers and count them.
Yet another distraction from the Epstein files not being released.
yet another example of the government attempting to frame a systematic error that would take effort to fix as a single incident that can be blamed on just a few people
Gotta' disagree.
There's an entire constellation of events that have distracted the public from the Epstein files, and it's a deluge, not a trickle. Iran war-that's-not-a-war, insider trading by the fat orange Nazi and his family and cronies, threats to tear down the Kennedy Center if he can't have his name on it, and the list grows longer every day he's playing "president."
And guess what. This story is back on the public's radar because of the pending firings.
Willy has mistakenly assume all those events are to distract the Epstein files.
You gave the clown too much credit.
If he released the Epstein files, people would just say he's distracting the public from Iran war.
He's just wreaking havoc everywhere. If you cause enough problems, each and all would collectively distract everything and each other.
Now stick to the topic.
Yeah, I'm leaning with Eskimo on this. *gasp* It's chaos theory, not a well-coordinated psy-op. Either way, firing these two controllers on a technicality doesn't fix the ATC system. They need better equipment (including transponders) and more hiring, training, support.
And we are still not talking about the complete indecisiveness and ensuing mayhem caused by the UA captain after 2 aborted takeoffs that triggered everything (and occupied 30 minutes of radio garbage on TWR / GND frequencies before the crash).
The audio of the captain..... completely indecisive, constant waffling on the situation, "their world and everyone else lives in it" attitude.... im sorry THAT person needs more scrutiny than ATC.
I agree 100%. Throwing the “E” word out there simply because he was frustrated is not acceptable. Though unintended, it started the chain of events.
Like I said, people stuck on the 1990_ hill can't visualize pass 2026.
Uh, literally talking about the need for specific remedies implemented here, now, and in the future, but that's not 'thinking ahead' enough for you... (getting rid of humans isn't a solution)
Fake news. FAA and ATC are cooked!
It's not okay but I can see how the culture develops.
At 10:00 pm 4 controllers handle 1000 movements an hour (250 per hour per controller). At midnight 4 controllers handle 400 movements and hours (100 per hour per controller). Likely the FAA HR staffing/shifts infrastructure aren't flexible enough to officially send them home early and the controllers are already vastly overworked with mandatory overtime... when things quiet down I can see why they would seek to help each other out in this way.
Has the FAA previously been clear that the early departure would not be tolerated?