LaGuardia did have a fully staffed ATC, and there's zero evidence this controller was overworked. You seem to be prematurely ascribing cause when nothing has been investigated yet.
The evidence that this controller was overworked is that practically all controllers in the US at present are overworked. As such, that should be treated as the null hypothesis, and it would require substantial evidence to show that he isn't overworked.
Its previous head had a term that didn't expire until 2028 but he resigned after pressure from Elon Musk (who didn't like that he got fined), now a Trump-friendly head has been installed. What, realistically, would be the consequences if he lied? Likely none. Government officials lying on record is an every day occurrence these days.
It does not at all mean that this controller was overworked when this crash happened; that would be failed reasoning and misuse of evidence.
It just raises the question, which should be looked at.
It's scary that so many don't seem to know the difference. This is how misinformation starts and spreads.
You're 100% right, a "Trump-friendly" administrator has been "installed" so we can't trust the FAA's conclusions. The last guy quit so this guy is definitely going to lie.
The parent post was unjustly flagged for no other reason than facts make overly emotional people here squirm with anger. Pathetic and lame.
This is worthy of losing flagging privileges IMO.
The Secretary of Transportation said on record at the first press conference that reports this guy was working alone in the tower are INACCURATE. The actual number is the responsibility of the NTSB to disclose.
95% of this discussion is people blowing smoke out of their ass as per usual.
From VAS Aviation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbm-QJAAzNY, or possibly in the comments, it was noted that there were 2 people on - one in the tower, one elsewhere in charge of approach. So perhaps, it's innacurate because he was working "with" the person on approach, but still accurate to what we would all call "working alone"?
It used to be that there was always a supervising controller on duty, who kind of rotated around each active controller, acted as backup for breaks, etc. for this class of airport - from my layman reading at least. This still seems to be the paper requirement.
So the minimum here would be 3 controllers given that nights setup. One for approach/ground, one for departure. Obviously you can argue more would be appropriate to segregate duties further, but it was a night shift headed into airport shutdown.
There seems to have been two working. The supervising controller double booked as a primary controller for departure at the time of incident. The fact the incident controller wasn’t immediately relieved of duty and had to spend 30 minutes shutting the airport down himself seems to match this explanation.
From what I’ve read on the matter for this tower not having a supervising controller was rather normalized - which is outside of SOP and something you need to report to management every time it happens. For this incident there was one - but sounds like one in name only. Once normalization of deviance happens, working in a way where two controllers that on paper should be sharing duties - but in practice are splitting them - seems exactly how I’d expect things to go.
But this is all speculation at this point of course. NTSB report will be interesting.
Either way - it has been clear for decades ATC needs both a massive surge in the staffing pipeline as well as a legitimate modernization program competently implemented. It’s certainly not a problem that started or remained in any single administration. Even if one or another had been worse, others sure as hell haven’t done much at all to fix the situation.
Everyone is stomping their feet saying the answer should be more than the number which has not yet been disclosed, so we don't know, but yet everyone also refuses to provide a definite number.
So tell me, for an airport that only has two runways which intersect, at LGA's volume, what is the correct number of controllers that should be working that field?
This also assumes the FAA hasn't already done this math and the gaming-chair experts know more than the FAA (which they don't).
If a member of this administration said he wasn’t working alone, that’s solid evidence he was.
The evidence that he was overworked seems pretty damned obvious. He forgot about an entire airplane and put a fire truck in its path. The evidence of overwork is strewn all around LGA.
