LaGuardia Airport crash: Plane was traveling 93-105 mph at time of ground collision

Yes, it was from a [now-deleted tweet](https://x.com/flightradar24/status/2036124011474600039) by FlightRadar24 that showed the final recorded speed after the collision.

Yes. Seems that was wrong.

View really distorts the speed (student pilot here and even being in a small plane being on a runway distorts your sense of speed), I could tell it was at least 70-80 watching the video.

The video showed it clearly going faster than a regular car ever would be

yeah that was wrong, you can see from the video it was moving at quite a speed

It was based on the last ping, which must have been after the crash slowed it down.

What’s crazier is the little I read yesterday had said the crash “only” had that much damage due to the relative lower speed of 25-30. I was looking at the wreckage thinking planes must crumble like new cars then. Tripling the speed makes more sense😅

It's criminal if it's true there was single controller on duty at LGA of all places. In the 90s I did a semester internship at the ATC facility at a commercial airport in a secondary city -- it had a controller each for Ground/Clearance, Tower, and two Approach/Departure positions. That's just a small international airport. I'll never forget flying in the Northeast for the first time. You had to have your shit together and the controllers never missed a beat. There was one guy at JFK who was a absolute legend. This whole thing makes me sick. Our controllers deserve better. And so does everyone who uses our airspace system.

Yes lets hope so. He's at the center of it.

It’s not like the government is responsible for creating a toxic environment for govt workers and forcing them to quit or be fired, oh wait…

Poor guy is probably already back at work.

Another gift of Ronald Reagan

As an ER doctor I have a lot of sympathy for this guy. There are lots of community emergency departments that are extremely overloaded in terms of patient volume with one single overworked overstressed ER doctor trying to make zero mistakes while being tasked with more and more workload by hospital administrations that care nothing for the ER until the nurses are striking at which point they'll come down with a cart of 50 cent snacks on a cart and talk about how we are all "family". But if that mistake is made, even if it's one mistake out of hundreds of thousands of decisions made, the doctor is the one liable in a potentially career ending lawsuit.

I work in customer support for mobile gaming. My boss always tells the team to not stress so much about tickets as we aren't 9-1-1 dispatchers. No lives are in our hands. Step back, breathe, move forward.

I saw someone else comment this and I just think it’s such a grim reflection of our world today: this ATC is probably going to face more public backlash for an honest mistake than the billionaires and politicians who actively made this situation happen through their greed and selfishness. It’s f****** sad.

I feel for him. That’s a lot to deal with and there’s a major systemic problem at the core of it. He’s also a victim of circumstance.

Supposedly he wasn’t even able to step away once the incident happened because there was no one to relieve him.  People in positions of power are saying all the time “do more with less!” “Reduce head count - these employees are costing us money!”  Well this is it - this is what it looks like to save money by doing more with less. Inevitably, people are going to get hurt. 

Remember when Reagan fired 12,000 air traffic controllers for being on strike

There were others in the tower. There was another plane that had just declared an emergency for an odor on the plane and they were dealing with that which left the one guy by himself.

Is this true?

So ICE is going to help out with air traffic control?

The realignment of runways has been very successful at reducing points of conflict and delays, but it was also lucky that there was enough room to do this, and that include purchasing and eminent domaining a fair bit of property around the airport, which was not without controversy. A lot of airports, including LaGuardia, do not really have enough space to expand so they can get rid of the crossing runways. They could theoretically expand the artificial peninsula further into Flushing Bay, but it would be a much more expensive and complicated project than doing it on existing land.

>I’m not going to say that this never would have happened under a different president Accident investigators stuck in TSA lines unable to get to site is 100% on the current US government and the two parties that make it up. Change is needed.

Only 2 deaths given the vehicles and speeds involved is a small miracle. Could have been a lot worse. Hope those injured don't have any serious long-term effects.

I'm not sure how fragile a plane is at 20-30mph but there is nothing left of that firetruck. I don't think even a freight train at 20-30mph would do that much damage to a firetruck

It pretty explicitly isn't his fault. Yes he was the person who made the calls that caused this to happen but he was placed in an untenable situation where an eventual error was essentially inevitable. He can't be reasonably blamed for this when the system utterly failed to support him in doing his job properly.

DOGE cancelling funding to the program that was training new flight controllers did more damage than who's transportation secretary. They disrupted getting new controllers by 3 years because of their funding cuts

I 100% agree. Very valid points.

From what i understand of many of the issues this would definitely help. The primary issue people don’t understand is the 2-3 year onboarding period, 56 mandatory retirement age, and the fact that any situation like the government shut down for instance in 2018-2019, for a month and a half, caused all the students to be sent home. The problem with that kind of interuption is you have very specific timed training during the year, and this effectly threw a wrench into the training pipeline, slowing the onboarding of new controllers for more then 1.5 months. They absolutely need to have more then 1 school. They should look at possible moving different parts of the training to more then just one school. I don’t know what the training involves but it seems like there should be ways to break it up so, as you say, people who have responsibilities like family elsewhere can spend a month at the school and a month back home kind of thing. It seems like some components might be possible to learn online, or at any major airport etc. ie rather then do everything in one roof, instead make it a series of smaller credits that can be completed at more locations, online, etc, and then once all credits are compiled, then have some final several month long evaluation process to find any holes in the training etc. i can’t imagine that all the training needs to be done by the same people at a single location. As having one place means government shut downs, etc have far greater effect then people understand. Or yea, open several schools. Having only one school is definitely part of the issue. The other issue is some of the support staffing was let go under doge, and that clearly has impacts as well. As any extra stress on the air traffic controllerd and systems can’t be helping things. Also America should stop snubbing their nose and learn to respect other nations enough to learn what they might be doing better. For instance in Canada there are several differences which america could easily adopt… 1/ Heavier pre-screening. Cognitive and psychomatric testing that must be passed even before training starts, resulting in far less applicants entering training, which has greatly improved wash out rates during training, greatly lowering training wasted costs. Testing things like spatial reasoning, multitasking ability, stress tolerance, etc 2/ Simulation Emphasis - heavier emphasis on high fidelity training sims early in training. Allowing for trainees to train without having to be at an actual real live facility, and pass basic core skills before needing live training. Again allowing for training to be happen at more facilities. 3/ Remove reliance on one central live training facility. Instead have more targeted/directed training for the specific type of air traffic they will be working with. Different regions, ie training aligned to specific operating environments. Such as the airport type(commercial passenger, cargo focused, small plane etc), or region specific training. Coastal vs central, etc ie rather then live training at some central facility, train at the airport they are being groomed to take over at. Or at the very least, in that general area. Allowing for more targeted training and putting less emphasis on one location for all that training, ie having to consider every possible scenario etc. if they are going to work at or near Los Angeles than train their live sessions there, similarly in NY international passenger and cargoe vs say Memphis being a FedEx Hub, etc. This again removes single point of failure with one school. 4/ Modular training. Break training into modular sections and figure out if that allows training in more locations or online for those sections. Again as above, allow for modulars to be completed online, at different locations, etc. again rather than everyone at one location only. 5/ Pay trainies if they manage to get through early filtering pay them enough to support a young family during training. Would greatly increase quality and number of candidates available. 6/ More insrtructors per trainee. Right now FA controllers are also expected to train new hires while trying to do their main job. Canada, Japan all have best in class efficient ratings at those airports, compared to US, so must be worth looking at because there isn’t the same issue with air traffic control shortages as in the US.

Yup, a retracted tweet that was misinterpreted got swept up into the endless train of copy pasting others’ work never bothering to double check the original

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That type of airplane (CRJ) has a landing reference speed (Vref) of 115 to 135 knots (132 to 155 mph) and, like any airplane, will not start slowing down until all wheels are touching the pavement. The CRJ need a minimum of 5,360 feet to land and slow down to a speed where it is possible to safely steer / taxi on the ground. At this phase of landing, the plane does not have enough energy to take off & climb, and it has too much energy to safely steer away from a perfectly straight line (if it tries, it will flip over). Its only possible choice is to go straight and brake hard.

Normal speeds for a plane just touching down.

I agree that this headline sounds like the plane was doing something abnormal, but the plane didn’t really have a choice but to be going this fast at this time.

It was landing so somewhere between 200 and 0 given that it'll land around 200 and stop at zero

Planes go fast.

It doesn't really matter, it just informs why the front end damage to the plane was so severe (vs expected damage at the previously rumored speed of 25mph).