LaGuardia controller staffing may have violated procedures on night of collision, document shows

Which is insane. Like should the nurses mistake be investigated yes. But when you give someone too many patients and put them on a 16 hour shift you dont get to act surprised when the inevitable happens. And the fact that management is allowed to ever work in that business again after doing something so willfully negligent is madness.

And no license to be held responsible either. It feels like at the very least.

Canada has the same plague of "fiscally responsible" "government must be efficient" smoothbrains that the US does. So does most of the world. The main difference is that most of the world built up stronger safety nets before that plague hit, so it's taking longer to cut them back.

You ain't wrong.

I wonder how much it would actually affect costs. Let's say a ATC employee costs $365k/year between salary, benefits, training, whatever else. I feel like that's a high estimate but it's for easy math. According to a cursory search, LaGuardia serves about 1000 flights per day. So it costs $1 per flight to staff an ATC. I don't know how many passengers on each flight, because presumably some amount of those are cargo flights, etc... that has no passengers. But it seems reasonable to assume the extra cost would be something less than 1 dollar per passenger at most. I'd love to know if this is illogical or I'm overlooking something here, but that seems like a reasonable cost. Maybe the number of small airports skews the math to be more expensive than it looks when only considering large airports, or ATC costs more than I thought, or it's just not possible to source revenue that way.

8. All while telling public it's fine, and blaming the overworked controller for whatever bad thing did end up happening!! Because it's clearly them not no staff

no, they fire the first worker, because they have better pay and benefits, and we're worse off than with 1 person from before because that 1 person had experience

LGA has a curfew at midnight, so they would never operate in this manner, but then the rule was rescinded and they may now? That's fucked. Most processes are built with blood, but when you get someone like Trump in there, you get no empathy.

Gotcha, I misunderstood

They can just reduce the workforce. Lotsa ways to make things worse.

My second favorite thing after (correctly) blaming Trump for anything bad, is (correctly) blaming Reagan for anything bad. It's hilarious how often you can go "Man, this thing sucks, I wonder why?" and the answer is Reagan.

Aka Trump 1.0

He's from the government and he's here to help

And Bush, and Clinton, and Bush, and Obama, and Trump, and Biden. It's been 45 years of both parties failing to solve this obvious crisis. 

As a controller (and the guy you replied to) I can confirm that stuff is true. Morale is lower than it's ever been. Just saying that the main issues we face, we've been facing for 40 years. Trump is just a little extra kick in the balls for people who are already down. 

You literally need 1 year of work experience to get hired. It’s a joke

You’re absolutely right, there is a plane already on the runway! I’ve updated the map to show both of those planes occupying the runway.

You don't think they're already asking ChatGPT that right now?

Honestly might be an unpopular take but I feel AI would actually be good for something like ATC in the long term. It seems like a such a high pressure job for humans where you have to keep track of so many things at once. “AI” isn’t inherently bad and it seems like it would excel at keeping track of a multitude of moving variables and a high volume of data all at once. At the very least it could be used to reduce the load and take stress off of human controllers. I feel computers would excel similarly to robotic factories. People and planes kinda act like all the moving pieces of production lines and all the robots moving around the factory floor. In terms of safety fears it’s not like we aren’t trusting our lives to a computer autopilot already. Computers are also already controlling pretty much every other traffic control system in our lives from traffic lights to trains. Why are we throwing humans into such a high stakes position where the thought of lives is constantly stressing them out and where a simple mistake can end in such tragedy. AI doesn’t inherently mean shitty LLM models that spout nonsense. **Edit:** For the record I’m not some AI bro trying to take people’s jobs. I just always think about all the controllers whose simple errors have caused lives to be lost. I just think that’s a shitty amount of responsibility to put on anyone’s shoulders. I make a mistake at work and like I have to fix something in a spreadsheet and I move on the next day. Meanwhile they make a similar mistake and people die and they are left with a life time of guilt. Let computers bear that burden assuming it can be done properly.

I bet a vehicle vector tracking program could help, but I'm not an NBA or safety professional.

Damn I almost missed the scarcm flag..

Further context is that the controller did correct their mistake and told the fire truck to stop multiple times, however the fire truck kept going. Who knows if the fire truck would have been hit regardless though.