In 2026, with how much money their is in aviation, it seems wild to not have digitized this ages ago. The runway should be essentially 'locked' when in use, if they don't want screens in every ground vehicle that may cross a runway, at least display it at runway entrances.
That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point. And there's pretty much no way to make ATC's job not stressful, its inherently stressful. Taking out how much of their job is held in the current operators mind versus being 'committed' seems like low hanging fruit 30 years ago.
The whole system's just begging for human error to occur. There's 1700+ runway incursions a year in the US alone, each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed. Like when an accident occurs.
While modernizing ATC in the US may be overdue, the real issue here is that ATC in the US has been understaffed, underpaid, and overworked for a while now.
My father works ATC and his schedule has him working overtime, 6 shifts a week, including overnight shifts, meaning that there is literally not a day of the week where he doesn't spend at least some time in the tower.
If that's the reality for even half of the controllers, it's no surprise that we've been seeing more and more traffic accidents lately.
Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.
Air traffic (and ground traffic) control are not simple problems. La Guardia has 350k aircraft operations (takeoffs and landings) every year. 1000/day. Peak traffic is almost certainly more than 1 plane every minute. Runways are always in use and the idea that some simple software will solve all the safety problems is not grounded in reality.
I'm pretty sure the amount of data isn't the problem here. Maybe it's the number of corner cases? You would still want some human-in-the loop with quality UI for ATC.
There are plenty of stories of ATC helping to guide pilots back to the ground after an engine failure or after a student pilot had their instructor pass out on them or something like that.
Even if most of the work is routine, you definitely still want a human in the loop.
A third runway for Heathrow was formally proposed in 2007 and is projected for completion in 2040. This is an airport so overburdened people are buying and trading slots.
This isn't a Kubernetes cluster where you can add VMs in 30 seconds.
>> Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.
A naive view that confuses the map with the territory.
While in a database state you write a row and reality updates atomically....for aircraft they exist in a physical world where your model lives with lag, noise, and lossy sensors, and that world keeps moving whether your software is watching or not. Failed database transactions roll back, a landing clearance issued against stale state does not. The hard problem in ATC is not coordination logic but physical objects with momentum, human agency, and failure modes that do not respect your consistency model.
This isn’t hypothetical, this system just exists in other countries. Digital systems can confirm flight instruction from ATC with zero radio communication.
I’m not saying we couldn’t move more into automation. What I’m saying is that doing so will not solve all of our air/ground control problems. We still have human pilots and humans driving vehicles on the ground. Switching from humans directing landings to machines might improve some things but will not solve for all (and probably not most) risks.
Literally the crash here was caused by a fire truck entering the runway.
But context is important. "Low-hanging fruit" doesn't mean the solution is "easy" in a vacuum, it just means this specific aspect is the easiest and/or most obvious place to start attacking a problem.
Or to stick with the language of the analogy, every fruit tree has some fruit that is lower than the others. That doesn't mean all "low-hanging fruit" is the same distance to the ground, some fruit just doesn't require as big of a ladder as other fruit.
This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case. I don't know enough about ATC to have any confidence in my opinion on the viability of replacing humans with software.
> The runway should be essentially 'locked' when in use, if they don't want screens in every ground vehicle that may cross a runway, at least display it at runway entrances.
It does, the Runway Status Lights System uses radar to identify when the runway is in use and shows a solid bright red bar at every entrance to the runway. I'm curious what the NTSB has to say about it for this incident. From the charts LGA does have RWSLs. I didn't check NOTAM to see if they were out of service though.
Emergency vehicles almost always can override/ignore warning devices (think firetrucks running red lights) which can cause "fun" for some value of "death/dismemberment/vehicle loss".
Airport emergency services are presumably trained in this, but since a plane cannot stop easily (or not at all on takeoff after V1), I seem to remember the general rule is that even emergency vehicles with lights and sirens on give way to planes, and don't enter runways without permission from the tower.
In the audio released by the BBC, the fire truck DID get permission from the tower to cross something, I can't tell if it was the runway in question. However, to cross the red runway lights if lit, you normally need that spelled out too something like "truck one, cross four delta, cross red lights". This did not happen on the BBC audio, which could mean one of many things.
They got clearance, which was overruled by a STOOOP!
The guy was alone operating 2 frequencies, had an emergency of another aircraft going on… is bot so easy as many commenters from the armchair are insinuating
From where I'm sitting, it's not really "the fault" of ATC (even though it is) simply because I'm not trusting enough of ATC even when they're on "my side".
When cleared across a runway I'm still going to be looking in all directions, and proceed as fast as I can. I also look both ways at railway crossings even if the guards are up and silent.
There are systems for it, just not really integrated into emergencies and ground vehicles. Mistakes also happen even if all info required to avoid is present
How would you exactly "digitize"? While that sounds like a nice idea in theory it's the same as "digitizing" road traffic.
In the end the air traffic system is a highly complex but also a highly reliable system, especially when you compare accident rates.
I am sure the working conditions of ATC staff might be improved - but being both a pilot and a programmer, I know that there is no easy digitalization magic wand for aviation.
I'm sure the NTSB report will cover why this didn't stop the accident. Presumably either the system wasn't working as-expected, or the fire truck proceeded despite the warning lights since they had clearance from the controller.
The system is only advisory at present, so if the truck did see a warning light and proceeded anyway, they were technically permitted to do so.
It's already digitized, he's clueless. The ATC knows where vehicle was and where the plane is going, it looks as simple case of mistake or maybe not watertight enough procedures
I'm sure they've started all of this a few times over the past decade. The problem is in the US if you can't start and finish a project like that in less than 2 years then it's effectively dead in the water. The last time we "modernized" ATC was closer to the 90's than today, when there was still some general political will to make our government agencies modern instead of tearing them to pieces.
>In the end the air traffic system is a highly complex but also a highly reliable system, especially when you compare accident rates.
1700 incursions a year, and other articles mentioning multiple near misses a week at a single airport [1]. It is safe in practice, likely largely due to the pilots here also being heavily trained and looking for mistakes, but it seems a lot like rolling the dice for a bad day.
>I am sure the working conditions of ATC staff might be improved - but being both a pilot and a programmer, I know that there is no easy digitalization magic wand for aviation.
I didn't say it'd be free. Just hard to believe radio voice communication is the best way to go.
> While that sounds like a nice idea in theory it's the same as "digitizing" road traffic.
Traffic lights instead of mad max intersections are better.
Then there's subway Automatic Train Control.
I don't know that Air Traffic Control staff don't have computer systems for establishing which plane owns what airspace. They at least did do it manually already following specific processes, so it can be at least augmented and a computer can check for conflicts automatically (if it isn't already). And, sure, ATC could still use radio, but there could be a digital standard for ensuring everybody has access to all local airspace data. Or maybe that wouldn't help.
Your ground vehicle wanting to cross a runway could have the driver punch "cross runway 5" button (cross-referenced with GPS) and try to grab an immediate 30 second mutex on it. The computer can check that the runway is not allocated in that time (i.e. it could be allocated 2 minutes in the future, and that would be fine).
But, as pointed out elsewhere, obviously some of this is already present: stop lights are supposed to be present at this intersection.
But in the highly dynamic environment of final approach, landing, and taxiing, I doubt it would be practical. Unless we want to try autonomous 'driving' on taxiways and runways?
> There's 1700+ runway incursions a year in the US alone, each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed. Like when an accident occurs.
How many runways crossings are there in a year? How much is "1700+" a percentage of that total?
The point is that it doesn't matter what percentage of the total they are, it's that 1 is too high without adequate explanation (the Gimli Glider caused vehicles to be guilty of a runway incursion by turning an abandoned runway into an active one, for example).
And the cost of investigating 1,700 should be within the budget.
Of course it matters. All of these entities have limited budgets and personnel and almost unlimited ways they could apply those resources. They have to choose what to chase and they do that by deciding how big of a problem it is.
If 1,700 is a huge percentage of runway uses (obviously it isn't but grant it, say at a single airport), then it's mandatory it be investigated because it's so huge.
If 1,700 is a minuscule fraction of all runway uses (as it likely is) then investigating it should be a proportionally minuscule amount of the budget.
You seem to be giving too much credit to the singleton design pattern. We know exactly how well that works on a modern, multi-tasking, preemptible operating system (hint: not well at all).
> That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point.
Voice communication is insane? I suspect you are ignorant of what it is like to actually fly a large aircraft into a busy airport. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment.
Listening to some recent close call ATC tapes, yes, it seems absolutely insane to manage current traffic levels with the existing number of controllers over voice.
I don't doubt that it's a very safe system with enough slack allowing for intentional redundancy. But as it is, some of these controllers seem to be limited by their ability to pronounce instructions, leaving absolutely no margin for error and presumably very little room for conscious thought.
Voice communication has the advantage is that it can be used without taking off hands and attention off controls. Digital solution would require using device.
Voice communication can still be used for anything out of the ordinary despite automating the common case.
Almost all voice transmissions are routine instructions/clearances from ground to air, with the pilots reading them back to reduce the chance of errors. In fact, this already exists and is in wide use in (at least) the US, EU, and in transoceanic airspace.
Of course, now you have two systems that can fail, and reducing reliance on the older one can easily cause automation complacency (which is a well-researched source of errors) and require more frequent refresher courses if the skill is not practiced on a continuos basis.
I suspect that that these are the reasons it's not commonly used for approach and tower operations: There's a lot more spontaneous and/or nonstandard stuff happening in those flight phases, and as you say you don't want a pilot's eyes on a tiny screen/keyboard instead of on their instruments or out the window.
ATC recording on https://www.liveatc.net/recordings.php
Fire truck was cleared to cross and then told to stop. I'm not sure if they were the only controller working at the time, they continued working after the incident which seems unusual; my understanding is normally they'd be relieved by another controller.
Which, as a non informed person but someone who needs to travel by plane, sounds absolutely insane. Was it always possible to staff that with a single person or is that a result of understaffing?
As an informed person (PPL flying single engine into smallish towered airports all the time), it is absolutely insane for an airport the size of LGA. Occasionally, you will encounter one guy doing tower and ground at very small class D airports or during not-so-busy shifts.
To play devil's advocate, ASEL into small deltas is significantly different than receiving full-stop IFRs late at night.
This small mistake (and it is initially small, just catastrophic) is a system breakdown, not necessarily a staffing breakdown. Though staffing is definitely a wider issue in the NAS.
Edit to add: looking at this incident closer it appears LGA was busy enough to make a single tower/ground controller an obviously bad plan. Still, systemically, there's enough low hanging fruit here, like ADSb in for the airport trucks or hold short line guard lights. I hope the takeaway isn't just "don't have controllers make mistakes".
Yea, if you listen to the ATC audio, you can hear that in addition to the normal high workload of handling both ground and tower, this guy had an emergency aircraft on a taxiway to deal with, too. A lot of holes in the swiss cheese lined up, but one of them clearly is ATC workload.
I fly out of a small-to-medium-sized airport in Canada and I've never seen it happen there. The idea of one person being responsible for both tower and ground in the busiest airspace in the US is absolute insanity.
It's not unusual for airports to reduce staff at night, and the incident occurred at 23:36 local time. Even at a very large airport in a very busy traffic area, one controller can probably handle normal operations at this hour.
The obvious problem is what happens when operations become abnormal. ATC shouldn't be staffed for normal operations, because then abnormal operations lead to catastrophe. Welcome to last night: the weather is bad, which causes a plane to abort two takeoffs, which causes that plane to need emergency services. This increases the controller's workload beyond his capacity, so he accidentally clears the emergency vehicle to cross in front of a landing airplane, and they can't see the airplane because the weather is bad, so they follow the instruction and promptly get hit with an airplane.
When some bad weather can be the difference between "this is fine, one controller can handle it" and two dead pilots, you need to be staffed for bad weather.
That seems unusual to me. It’s common at smaller airports, but for a big one like LaGuardia I’d think tower and ground would be two different controllers, even lateish at night like this was. I know there has been a staffing problem for controllers in the NY area for some time.
Reddit aviation groups are full of professional pilots, saying how terrified they of flying into La Guardia or JFK, recounting close calls, with one saying how he avoided those two for 10 years...
But think of the money they saved by not having to pay another air traffic controller! A controller's yearly salary is the cost of about 10 seconds of the Iran war, based on the recently-reported figure of $11.3B for six days.
I don't think it's money. I think it's requirements and training pipeline restraints. The system is predicated on being able to throw bodies at the problem, but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up. Personally, I didn't realize ATC as a possible career path until I was 36-- imagine my surprise when I found that I had already aged out.
Who would want to work that job once they find out what the day-to-day is like? I had an intern who looked at that out of the Air Force but he found out what you get paid and what the expectations are for the job and he figured he'd try his luck on something easier and better-paying like life-preserving medical devices. On a related note, why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?
It’s not a money thing. It’s a shortage of people who are mentally able to do the job mixed with terrible hours and early forced retirements. ATC school has a failure rate of over 50 percent.
It's partially a money thing. ATC is under-compensated. They'd get more - and more talented - people interested if the money made up for the stress, hours, and early forced retirement.
> I'm not sure if they were the only controller working at the time, they continued working after the incident which seems unusual; my understanding is normally they'd be relieved by another controller
I remember late last year, couple of months ago, US ATC controllers were without pay but forced to work anyways (similar to TSA I suppose, although I don't think they were forced, but volunteered to work without salary), is that still the situation? Couldn't find any updates about that the situation been resolved, nor any updates that it's ongoing, if so though it feels like it'd be related to the amount of available controllers.
ATCs weren't exactly forced to work: they aren't slaves and are free to quit any time. But if they didn't show up for assigned shifts even though they weren't getting paid then they were subject to disciplinary action including termination. Some of them called in sick, or took on temporary second jobs to bring in some cash (obviously a bad thing from a fatigue management standpoint). After the government shutdown they were paid in arrears for all of the hours they worked. It's crazy that Congress plays political games with essential services like ATC.
The US has had trouble keeping enough controllers. It's a skilled but extremely stressful job, and so retention would always be difficult but the US also works hard to make it suck more than it should, and of course the over-work from not having enough people makes that even worse.
But no, AIUI only things that were somehow deemed part of "Homeland Security" are frozen, the TSA are part of Homeland Security but the ATC are under the FAA. So this particular partial government funding lapse wasn't causal, at least directly.
Utterly unqualified to suggest any causes (wait for the NTSB report on that), but couple compounding factors I've read elsewhere to begin to understand the situation and context:
- Another plane was out of position, grabbing some attention of the controller
- Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
- The colliding plane didn't have "explicit" landing clearance, but a "follow previous plane and land the same way unless told otherwise" implicit landing clearance. In Europe, planes need an explicit landing clearance, the act of granting it may have brought attention to the runway contention. US implicit system (arguably) is a bit more efficient, debate will now be is it worth it (pilots are now required to read back instructions because of past blood... will this result in same thing?)
- This was around midnight and apparently a little foggy, making visual contacts harder
Remember folks, disasters like this are rarely caused by a single factor. NTSB reports are excellent post-mortems that look at all contributing factors and analyze how they compounded into failure. Be human here.
In Europe is illegal to capture and publish ATC. I wonder why. Anyway I do not know what are you comparing.
From pilot friends, in best case I would say a big “depends” in some countries are very unprofessional, in others very professional (anyway total unfair generalization). There were already accidents because of that, for example because the twr communicated with locals in non english, so not everybody was at the same page.
Was curious if ground vehicles at airports also use transponders to communicate position to the radio tower, and it turns out the FAA put out a report last year on potential solutions to avoid this exact situation:
The only negative I can think of is that it will generally involve accepting and responding to clearances on short final. I think adding more tasks to that critical stage of flight probably increases danger a little. Especially for low time student pilots like myself. That's particularly relevant in the U.S. because we have a higher percentage of student and private pilots than most of the world.
Overall, though, I'm fully convinced this would be safer.
Transponder doesn't alter the laws of physics for the landing plane you just cut off. I guess it gives ATC a ~5sec jump on telling some other flight to go around.
I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
The trajectory of the plane is obvious enough that it should be able to predict where it will likely be in 30 seconds or a minute. You can't cheat physics, if it is going down in direction of runway, it is landing or at worst will do go-around, so the services should be alterted runway is no-go automatically
> I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
I highly doubt that any system would intentionally give ground vehicles of any kind special treatment on an active runway.
Emergency vehicles were en route to another emergency in progress on the other runway. Sadly it sounds like a fire truck was cleared to cross the active runway moments before the CRJ landed. By the time the controller realized that mistake it was too late.
I'm very, very curious about whether the ARFF crew visually cleared the runway and final before crossing the hold short line. It's standard procedure for flight crew to do this, specifically to mitigate the risk of ATC errors.
Reports are there were fog and rain at La Guardia at the time of the incident. They were on a short final, and it’s entirely possible they were not visible to the fire truck’s crew.
Yes ARFF should still look before crossing, but the weather wasn’t great with limited visibility and thus even if they looked it’s possible they didn’t see anything.
> Captain and first officer are reported to have died in the accident, two fire fighters on board of the truck received serious injuries, 13 passengers received injuries.
Another option: they shouldn't be government employees at all. It would be much better for them to work for the actual airports themselves and be certified by the government or a private testing organization instead.
Which government? State, Federal, City, or a Port Commission? There is in fact a significant distinction between the responsibilities and capabilities of each of these levels of government and you can't lump them all together. My home airport is operated by a port commission, which is government, but the port commission's task is to operate the ports.
The shortage of ATC staff dates back to the Clinton Administration. It’s just hard to attract people into a 5+ year training program for a very stressful job where you might get bounced near the end with no payout and no transferrable job skills.
No the shortage goes back to Regan when their justified strike was busted. It ended the PATCO “union” and was a negative turning point for labour unions in general.
I think you mean Reagan. He removed the union for the ATC not Clinton.
Honestly, you can generally just blame Reagan for about anything. A presidency about weaking labor, strengthening Iran, and ballooning the deficit is uh never going to leave good traces.
Reagan did the right thing in that case. Government employees should never have collective bargaining rights. Public employee unions are contrary to the interests of taxpayers.
Over the course of the past year, I think we've seen more evidence that the federal workforce's collective bargaining rights aren't strong enough. Workers' employment contracts are being ignored, employees are being threatened, constructively terminated, all in an attempt to enact RIFs without following the law.
Things are happening to the federal workforce right now that aren't even legal in the private sector.
You have to have your contract violated for a significant amount before you can notionally afford to hire a lawyer to fight it out. Below 5 figures it doesn't make much financial sense to do that for most people, so they just eat it instead. It's how a lot of "theft of wages" and other mistreatment happens so often. Lawyers don't take those cases for free, and court isn't free either. And you're not going to instantly appear at the top of the docket for something small like that especially if the government buries you in procedure. They can do that for years.
But sure, yeah you can seek redress through the courts.
Suing the federal government solo is an insurmountable task for most people -- even more so while they're being constructively terminated. Employee unions have been suing on their workers behalf over the past year, but the executive branch can drag out federal trials for a lot longer than people can stay without a job.
Yes, absolutely. No government employees should ever have collective bargaining rights. If they want better wages and working conditions then they can advocate for those through the political process, the same as any other citizen.
Collective bargaining rights shouldn’t even be a separate thing. They’re just a natural consequence of the fact that free speech is protected and slavery is illegal. The idea of an illegal strike is bizarre.
ATC/GTC seems like a really strong candidate for partial automation with recent advances in AI. Obviously we'd still want some expert humans in the loop for exceptional situations, but I have to imagine there's a way to significantly reduce the cognitive burden/stress for these folks.
Recent advances in AI aren't useful for routine operations in safety critical domains such as aviation because we don't know how to verify and test them. An LLM is effectively an unpredictable black box with unknown failure modes. There is opportunity for greater automation but probably based on classical deterministic programming.
Yup, it's been a problem ever since Regan (a Republican) fired over 11,000 ATC employees. And by "anyone" ITYM "republicans" again, because Democrats have been trying for years.
I'm curious about what kind of visualization does the ATC have at the disposal about the current occupancy of the individual tarmac segments? I'd assume if an airplane is approaching for landing on a specific runway, that runway should have been clearly marked as restricted for access until the plane would actually land and clear it?
In the US, airplanes can be cleared for landing while the runway is occupied (you can be number two, three, etc. for landing and still be cleared). It's different in other countries, where you can only be issued a landing clearance if the runway is clear or anticipated to be clear before you land (e.g. the plane before you is already exiting the runway).
The way it's supposed to work, the ground controller first verifies that there are no traffic conflicts before clearing vehicles to cross an active runway.
The fire truck was flipped and moved to the side of the runway, this was not 24mph. 24mph is the final groundspeed recorded after the aircraft skidded off of the runway.
Per the ADSBx track the plane was at 101kts (115 mph / 185kph) just before crossing taxiway D, which would be where it hit the firetruck. It still had enough energy afterwards to reach taxiway E, 600ft away.
The results seem on the high end but they check out at first glance.
A plane is basically a flimsy tube. A firetruck is a solid brick comparatively. The plane out weighs the fire truck by a lot and out speeds it by a lot. So yeah, destroying the whole front of the plane to punt the truck it sounds about right for a 25 on 5 or 35 on 10/15 type rear ending to me. Flipping doesn't really sound that unreasonable considering that the plane made contact with the top of the truck (just by virtue of comparative height) and contact may not have been straight on. Even if it left the pavement on it's wheels airport firefighters aren't exactly who I'd bet on (they're middle of the pack) to keep the truck on it's wheels if they got surprise kicked off the road especially if there's an embankment involved.
Pause the video at 13 sec. That firetruck is awfully intact for something that allegedly got hit at high speed. Basically just a bunch of top side sheetmetal damage (concentrated to the rear, obviously). In any case it didn't even get sent hard enough to screw up the cab exterior. And on the flip side, if you keep cranking the speed up you start getting to where the plane starts looking too suspiciously intact. There's just not much room to work backwards from the apparent results and get a high difference in speed or get very high initial speeds (100 onto 75 or whatever). If the plane was going fast the truck had to be going fast too or there'd be more carnage. But if they were both going fast you'd expect more damage from the after the fact barrel roll and the plane and truck to be a little farther apart in distance.
Fire truck is filled to brim with gear and doesn't care all that much about weight, plane is the opposite of that, lightness is money, so it makes sense fire truck looks better after crash than plane
The back of a firetruck is not a working implement like a dump truck is nor is it sufficiently strong for mounting a crane or man bucket like utility bodies often are It's a bunch of sheetmetal boxes to hold stuff and cover stuff and there's a water tank back there somewhere. In the middle down low some pumps are buried. Basically don't think of it as being any more structural than a box truck body because it's not. All that stuff got shredded, obviously, since they're only really meant to bear their own weight and were subject to all the truck tossing forces here. Beyond that the truck is in pretty good shape. It's not uncommon for a good "off the highway and into the ditch" crash to rip tandems off, twist frames, etc. None of that has happened here. The plane is pretty rough, but that's expected. They are 100% tin cans. Ground equipment moving at idle speeds will absolutely shred them before the operator even feels resistance. A goose hit square on the leading edge of a small jet's wing will put a massive dent in (and apply red paint, lol).
24 sounds about right for a closing speed for plane onto truck. Whatever the baseline speed of the truck was cannot have been that high or the truck would be absolutely shredded from the barrel roll and as it stand the cab is barely pushed in.
The last recorded ground speed data of 24mph also shows a wildly different heading (going from 30deg ish to 170ish). So it probably happened after the collision and was part of its deceleration. As far as I know, the truck would have been crossing the runway so the effective speed perpendicular to the plane would be zero except for directional shear I guess.
The speed was much higher per sibling comment, but also remember that kinetic energy also involves mass (planes are heavy) and the square of the velocity.
It looks like that is based on the last recorded speed from flightradar24[1] which was 21kts(24mph). The previous data points were 11kts, and 58 kts(the last point before the track deviates off the runway). I do think it is likely that the collision occurred at a speed faster than 24mph.
edit: Looking into this a bit more it looks like the plane came to a stop around crossing E while the emergency vehicle was crossing at D(based on ATC recordings). Using the following map as reference[2], the 58kts point was around E, while the previous recorded point which was just before D was 114kts.
On other hand planes are really not designed to be crashed into things. Only for limited impacts. So we might not have right comparison for relatively thin and aimed to be light structure being impacted by bulkier object.
Speed doesn't cause damage. Momentum causes damage. We understand speed, we do not understand momentum. It makes sense given our evolution.
People into boats need to understand this. Even a boat that travels no more than 4mph can crush you easily. This is why you never get on to moving boat from the front. Many people have made a mistake because speed is not high.
Tugboats bump other boats all day. Hundred thousand pound pieces of machinery bury themselves into the dirt. All this as part of normal operation. It's not that simple.
Speed, kinetic energy and acceleration are all interrelated and at the end of the day it's all forces (to some extent) and no amount of hand wringing commentary is going to replace genuine understanding of them.
Gravity. The aircraft is heavier at the back, where the engines are. With the nose severely damaged/missing, the centre of gravity has shifted aft, so what’s left of the nose is sticking up in the air.
I’d guess the front landing gear assembly is going to be fairly heavy, and appears to be missing. This model of plane also has its engines at the rear, not under the wing, which will move the balance to the back.
Planes typically have their center of gravity just forward of the rear wheels. This makes it easier to rotate on takeoff.
The margins are thin enough that certain planes will sometimes have people in the back get off first, before the people on the front, to avoid tipping onto the tail like this.
The entire cockpit, front toilet and galley area, and probably a front row seat have all been utterly destroyed. Unfortunately I'd be amazed if the death toll stays at two.
Are the increased number of air incidents since Dec 2024 reflective of anything real or is it more attention on something? Brigida v. USDOT comes to mind but doesn't seem relevant. I'm sure we could all construct a chain of "this thing happened that caused that which caused this" and so on, but I'm curious if someone has done the effort to see whether such a chain is defensible.
Also, did the pilots die in the collision or in some sort of aftermath? The cockpit looks absolutely smashed.
You can probably construct a realistic chain of failure that goes all the way back to political tomfoolery and bad air traffic control leadership/staffing decisions, but that makes the wrong people look bad, so they'll probably blame individuals further down the totem pole like the controller or pilot and call it a day.
It should be noted that aircraft and all other vehicle and personel movements on an airport are controlled from the airtraffic control tower by air traffic controllers or
directly by individual flaggers, as directed from the tower.
Or at least thats the way it is supposed to work, and of course the operation at a place like LaGuardia is more complex, and will have specialists and multiple zones.
What will put an extra edge on this is the
whole ICE thing, and airport chaos pulling the roof down.
> What will put an extra edge on this is the whole ICE thing, and airport chaos pulling the roof down.
How would the ICE thing cause more ground traffic collisions. Are you thinking ATC controllers are illegal immigrants and they’re going to run away during their shift? I just don’t see a connection there…
Not the crash, but the aftermath. Passengers will be showing up for flights today, nervous with the crash on their minds, and many will then encounter untrained goons cosplaying as airport security.
This incident caused delays and cancellations that ripple throughout an already understaffed network of TSA checkpoints. ICE presence will make airport security somehow an even worse experience for brown people.
This comes to mind how during the Boeing news scandals, commenters would confidently argue "Flying is still ridiculously safe, statistically speaking", "these things happen every day, just underreported", and "you/people are irrational for not flying Boeing". It's a very curious argument to me. Is the ATC infrastructure issue analogous or not, etc.
Maybe US media, hardly an unbiased news source about US events, especially when hundreds of billions are flying around about incompetent massive employer and lobbyist.
Nowhere else in the world you would hear such statements. Boeings simply disappeared from Europe, those few that were here before. I am sure they are still used somewhere but I haven't flown any in past 7-8 years. Heck, I haven't seen any in South east Asia neither (but that may be due to luck).
I check this with all bookings, no way I am flying that piece of shit if I can anyhow avoid that, not alone and quadruple that with family.
It is strange. What is importa t is, are things getting better or getting worse? As they say, it’s not the fall that kills, bit the impact. Are we falling?
/r/xyz doesnt need to fact check. Sure those are excellent subs but just being watering holes and not legal entities they can move faster. There were some wrong facts on r/aviation although it got viral so people just ploughed in with whatever news outlet they read it on.
The clearance for AC8646 to land on runway 4 is given in a sequence starting at 4:58. "Vehicle needs to cross the runway" at 6:43. Truck 1 and company asks for clearance to cross 4 at 6:53. Clearance is granted at 7:00. Then ATC asks both a Frontier and Truck 1 to stop, voice is hurried and it's confusing.
If only we could diff the BBC article (it currently says it was posted 21 mins ago which is younger than your comment…). It’s changed multiple times now without any kind of changelog or acknowledgement.
> Video footage on social media showed the aircraft, which is operated by Air Canada's regional partner Jazz aviation, coming to a rest with its nose upturned.
This just isn’t true. There’s no video of the plane coming to a rest with its nose upturned (which implies motion). The upturned nose happened only after passengers deplaned and the balance shifted.
> It had slowed to about 24mph when it collided with a vehicle from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.
This is the next part that will change. Just because some of the last broadcast data said 24mph doesn’t mean that’s the speed it was when it collided with the truck. The truck is on its side and those passengers are in hospital. The pilots are dead. The plane sustained enough structural damage to have the entire nose collapse. If the sentence is based on that broadcast data, SAY THAT instead of printing it as fact.
And with all the quotes from social media posts from key groups, link to them instead of just vaguely quoting.
EDIT:
As expected, they got rid of the above paragraph claiming the speed. It now says:
“The plane was arriving from Montreal and had landed, before colliding with the vehicle from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.”
Any of us can help log the changes by submitting revisions of the article to web.archive.org
With a fast-changing news story where vague/incomplete/conflicting details emerge in the first few hours it's not unreasonable for the first few revisions to be like that, and eventually gets fixed hours or a day later.
I think that’s what’s critical here. Post details and their sources to show that they are in flux. Don't write them as fact and then make secret edits.
Because some of them still have standards. They will correct themselves if something was wrong.
Everyone can write a comment on Reddit / make a podcast / video / whatever claiming whatever they want. Unless you already know and trust them (which requires you to be able to cross-check their information), it's potentially as useful as a random LLM hallucination. Could be brilliantly spot on, or could be completely nonsense. No way of knowing unless you already know enough. (Because even cross-checking won't necessarily save you, if you cross-check multiple bullshit sources).
Media with standards (like the BBC, Guardian, Liberation, etc.) will do their best to report truthfully (even if sometimes with some bias), and will fix their mistakes if they're caught later on or the story evolves. Independent media checking organisations have shown time and time again that there is trustworthy media, you just need to know which it is, and always take a pinch of salt. It's wild to me that people will just dismiss rags such as Fox News and relatively quality media like Guardian in the same breath.
Introduce a foreign object onto the runway and it will inevitably collide with an aircraft. The fire trucks aren't part of the airport traffic management system, their sudden presence is bound to lead to problems eventually.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the truck has a single radio (airplanes always have two) and was constantly switching between ATC and fire house frequencies. The probably never heard the "stop, stop, stop stop.."
It would also not surprise me if airports previously had dedicated fire services, which have since been outsourced for cost reasons.
According to this article, the air traffic controller gave the fire truck permission to cross the runway. So, it seems like they are part of the air traffic management system?
In 2026, with how much money their is in aviation, it seems wild to not have digitized this ages ago. The runway should be essentially 'locked' when in use, if they don't want screens in every ground vehicle that may cross a runway, at least display it at runway entrances.
That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point. And there's pretty much no way to make ATC's job not stressful, its inherently stressful. Taking out how much of their job is held in the current operators mind versus being 'committed' seems like low hanging fruit 30 years ago.
The whole system's just begging for human error to occur. There's 1700+ runway incursions a year in the US alone, each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed. Like when an accident occurs.
While modernizing ATC in the US may be overdue, the real issue here is that ATC in the US has been understaffed, underpaid, and overworked for a while now.
My father works ATC and his schedule has him working overtime, 6 shifts a week, including overnight shifts, meaning that there is literally not a day of the week where he doesn't spend at least some time in the tower.
If that's the reality for even half of the controllers, it's no surprise that we've been seeing more and more traffic accidents lately.
Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the boiling?
Why do so many jobs have this failure mode? Thinking about this should illuminate for you that funding is not the whole story.
Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.
Air traffic (and ground traffic) control are not simple problems. La Guardia has 350k aircraft operations (takeoffs and landings) every year. 1000/day. Peak traffic is almost certainly more than 1 plane every minute. Runways are always in use and the idea that some simple software will solve all the safety problems is not grounded in reality.
> more than 1 plane every minute
Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.
I'm pretty sure the amount of data isn't the problem here. Maybe it's the number of corner cases? You would still want some human-in-the loop with quality UI for ATC.
There are plenty of stories of ATC helping to guide pilots back to the ground after an engine failure or after a student pilot had their instructor pass out on them or something like that.
Even if most of the work is routine, you definitely still want a human in the loop.
In a digitized environment. We cannot yet simulate the real world.
with extremely controlled conditions. There is no fog in database, nor fallible humans involved, What an ignorant response
True. But to avoid 1 minute unavailability per year requires 99.9999 % availability
Like any scale system, degrade the experience. Use radio if the more advanced systems are unavailable?
Yup, by having backup runways.
A third runway for Heathrow was formally proposed in 2007 and is projected for completion in 2040. This is an airport so overburdened people are buying and trading slots.
This isn't a Kubernetes cluster where you can add VMs in 30 seconds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport
And no fire trucks crossing the runways.
....they need to get to fucking fire
....if they go around kilometer of the runway the fire will turn into bigger fire
>> Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.
A naive view that confuses the map with the territory.
While in a database state you write a row and reality updates atomically....for aircraft they exist in a physical world where your model lives with lag, noise, and lossy sensors, and that world keeps moving whether your software is watching or not. Failed database transactions roll back, a landing clearance issued against stale state does not. The hard problem in ATC is not coordination logic but physical objects with momentum, human agency, and failure modes that do not respect your consistency model.
Hehehehe, grounded.
This isn’t hypothetical, this system just exists in other countries. Digital systems can confirm flight instruction from ATC with zero radio communication.
I’m not saying we couldn’t move more into automation. What I’m saying is that doing so will not solve all of our air/ground control problems. We still have human pilots and humans driving vehicles on the ground. Switching from humans directing landings to machines might improve some things but will not solve for all (and probably not most) risks.
Literally the crash here was caused by a fire truck entering the runway.
No one said it was simple. You're tilting at windmills.
Literally called it “low hanging fruit”.
But context is important. "Low-hanging fruit" doesn't mean the solution is "easy" in a vacuum, it just means this specific aspect is the easiest and/or most obvious place to start attacking a problem.
Or to stick with the language of the analogy, every fruit tree has some fruit that is lower than the others. That doesn't mean all "low-hanging fruit" is the same distance to the ground, some fruit just doesn't require as big of a ladder as other fruit.
This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case. I don't know enough about ATC to have any confidence in my opinion on the viability of replacing humans with software.
> The runway should be essentially 'locked' when in use, if they don't want screens in every ground vehicle that may cross a runway, at least display it at runway entrances.
It does, the Runway Status Lights System uses radar to identify when the runway is in use and shows a solid bright red bar at every entrance to the runway. I'm curious what the NTSB has to say about it for this incident. From the charts LGA does have RWSLs. I didn't check NOTAM to see if they were out of service though.
Emergency vehicles almost always can override/ignore warning devices (think firetrucks running red lights) which can cause "fun" for some value of "death/dismemberment/vehicle loss".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0Xf7aU5Udo
Airport emergency services are presumably trained in this, but since a plane cannot stop easily (or not at all on takeoff after V1), I seem to remember the general rule is that even emergency vehicles with lights and sirens on give way to planes, and don't enter runways without permission from the tower.
In the audio released by the BBC, the fire truck DID get permission from the tower to cross something, I can't tell if it was the runway in question. However, to cross the red runway lights if lit, you normally need that spelled out too something like "truck one, cross four delta, cross red lights". This did not happen on the BBC audio, which could mean one of many things.
They got clearance, which was overruled by a STOOOP!
The guy was alone operating 2 frequencies, had an emergency of another aircraft going on… is bot so easy as many commenters from the armchair are insinuating
From where I'm sitting, it's not really "the fault" of ATC (even though it is) simply because I'm not trusting enough of ATC even when they're on "my side".
When cleared across a runway I'm still going to be looking in all directions, and proceed as fast as I can. I also look both ways at railway crossings even if the guards are up and silent.
There are systems for it, just not really integrated into emergencies and ground vehicles. Mistakes also happen even if all info required to avoid is present
How would you exactly "digitize"? While that sounds like a nice idea in theory it's the same as "digitizing" road traffic.
In the end the air traffic system is a highly complex but also a highly reliable system, especially when you compare accident rates.
I am sure the working conditions of ATC staff might be improved - but being both a pilot and a programmer, I know that there is no easy digitalization magic wand for aviation.
The Runway Status Light system already does this via automated monitoring of traffic from multiple systems: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl
I'm sure the NTSB report will cover why this didn't stop the accident. Presumably either the system wasn't working as-expected, or the fire truck proceeded despite the warning lights since they had clearance from the controller.
The system is only advisory at present, so if the truck did see a warning light and proceeded anyway, they were technically permitted to do so.
It's already digitized, he's clueless. The ATC knows where vehicle was and where the plane is going, it looks as simple case of mistake or maybe not watertight enough procedures
I'm sure they've started all of this a few times over the past decade. The problem is in the US if you can't start and finish a project like that in less than 2 years then it's effectively dead in the water. The last time we "modernized" ATC was closer to the 90's than today, when there was still some general political will to make our government agencies modern instead of tearing them to pieces.
>In the end the air traffic system is a highly complex but also a highly reliable system, especially when you compare accident rates.
1700 incursions a year, and other articles mentioning multiple near misses a week at a single airport [1]. It is safe in practice, likely largely due to the pilots here also being heavily trained and looking for mistakes, but it seems a lot like rolling the dice for a bad day.
>I am sure the working conditions of ATC staff might be improved - but being both a pilot and a programmer, I know that there is no easy digitalization magic wand for aviation.
I didn't say it'd be free. Just hard to believe radio voice communication is the best way to go.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/21/business/airl...
> While that sounds like a nice idea in theory it's the same as "digitizing" road traffic.
Traffic lights instead of mad max intersections are better.
Then there's subway Automatic Train Control.
I don't know that Air Traffic Control staff don't have computer systems for establishing which plane owns what airspace. They at least did do it manually already following specific processes, so it can be at least augmented and a computer can check for conflicts automatically (if it isn't already). And, sure, ATC could still use radio, but there could be a digital standard for ensuring everybody has access to all local airspace data. Or maybe that wouldn't help.
Your ground vehicle wanting to cross a runway could have the driver punch "cross runway 5" button (cross-referenced with GPS) and try to grab an immediate 30 second mutex on it. The computer can check that the runway is not allocated in that time (i.e. it could be allocated 2 minutes in the future, and that would be fine).
But, as pointed out elsewhere, obviously some of this is already present: stop lights are supposed to be present at this intersection.
> That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point.
There is digital comms with ATC without voice:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller–pilot_data_link_com...
* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/DataComm
But in the highly dynamic environment of final approach, landing, and taxiing, I doubt it would be practical. Unless we want to try autonomous 'driving' on taxiways and runways?
The BBB allocated $12B for ATC modernization. https://www.faa.gov/new-atcs
Money isn't the only reason it's so old. The coordination problems are huge. https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/24/us_air_traffic_contro...
> There's 1700+ runway incursions a year in the US alone, each one should be investigated as if an accident occurred and fixes proposed. Like when an accident occurs.
How many runways crossings are there in a year? How much is "1700+" a percentage of that total?
The point is that it doesn't matter what percentage of the total they are, it's that 1 is too high without adequate explanation (the Gimli Glider caused vehicles to be guilty of a runway incursion by turning an abandoned runway into an active one, for example).
And the cost of investigating 1,700 should be within the budget.
Of course it matters. All of these entities have limited budgets and personnel and almost unlimited ways they could apply those resources. They have to choose what to chase and they do that by deciding how big of a problem it is.
If 1,700 is a huge percentage of runway uses (obviously it isn't but grant it, say at a single airport), then it's mandatory it be investigated because it's so huge.
If 1,700 is a minuscule fraction of all runway uses (as it likely is) then investigating it should be a proportionally minuscule amount of the budget.
My very fuzzy back of the envelope says easily 10s of thousands per day.
You seem to be giving too much credit to the singleton design pattern. We know exactly how well that works on a modern, multi-tasking, preemptible operating system (hint: not well at all).
> That ATC still takes place over radio just seems insane at this point.
Voice communication is insane? I suspect you are ignorant of what it is like to actually fly a large aircraft into a busy airport. Fault-tolerant and highly available hardware must facilitate low-latency, single-threaded communication with high semantic density in order to achieve multi-dimensional consensus in a safety-critical, heterogeneous, adversarial environment.
There is some interesting research that captures this sentiment and shows how complex a solution might need to be (replace "faulty agent" with "human error"): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00051...
Listening to some recent close call ATC tapes, yes, it seems absolutely insane to manage current traffic levels with the existing number of controllers over voice.
I don't doubt that it's a very safe system with enough slack allowing for intentional redundancy. But as it is, some of these controllers seem to be limited by their ability to pronounce instructions, leaving absolutely no margin for error and presumably very little room for conscious thought.
Voice communication has the advantage is that it can be used without taking off hands and attention off controls. Digital solution would require using device.
Voice communication can still be used for anything out of the ordinary despite automating the common case.
Almost all voice transmissions are routine instructions/clearances from ground to air, with the pilots reading them back to reduce the chance of errors. In fact, this already exists and is in wide use in (at least) the US, EU, and in transoceanic airspace.
Of course, now you have two systems that can fail, and reducing reliance on the older one can easily cause automation complacency (which is a well-researched source of errors) and require more frequent refresher courses if the skill is not practiced on a continuos basis.
I suspect that that these are the reasons it's not commonly used for approach and tower operations: There's a lot more spontaneous and/or nonstandard stuff happening in those flight phases, and as you say you don't want a pilot's eyes on a tiny screen/keyboard instead of on their instruments or out the window.
HN has recently banned AI written / edited comments. Be better.
ATC recording on https://www.liveatc.net/recordings.php Fire truck was cleared to cross and then told to stop. I'm not sure if they were the only controller working at the time, they continued working after the incident which seems unusual; my understanding is normally they'd be relieved by another controller.
They were indeed the only controller, working both ground and tower frequencies.
Which, as a non informed person but someone who needs to travel by plane, sounds absolutely insane. Was it always possible to staff that with a single person or is that a result of understaffing?
As an informed person (PPL flying single engine into smallish towered airports all the time), it is absolutely insane for an airport the size of LGA. Occasionally, you will encounter one guy doing tower and ground at very small class D airports or during not-so-busy shifts.
To play devil's advocate, ASEL into small deltas is significantly different than receiving full-stop IFRs late at night.
This small mistake (and it is initially small, just catastrophic) is a system breakdown, not necessarily a staffing breakdown. Though staffing is definitely a wider issue in the NAS.
Edit to add: looking at this incident closer it appears LGA was busy enough to make a single tower/ground controller an obviously bad plan. Still, systemically, there's enough low hanging fruit here, like ADSb in for the airport trucks or hold short line guard lights. I hope the takeaway isn't just "don't have controllers make mistakes".
Yea, if you listen to the ATC audio, you can hear that in addition to the normal high workload of handling both ground and tower, this guy had an emergency aircraft on a taxiway to deal with, too. A lot of holes in the swiss cheese lined up, but one of them clearly is ATC workload.
I fly out of a small-to-medium-sized airport in Canada and I've never seen it happen there. The idea of one person being responsible for both tower and ground in the busiest airspace in the US is absolute insanity.
It's not unusual for airports to reduce staff at night, and the incident occurred at 23:36 local time. Even at a very large airport in a very busy traffic area, one controller can probably handle normal operations at this hour.
The obvious problem is what happens when operations become abnormal. ATC shouldn't be staffed for normal operations, because then abnormal operations lead to catastrophe. Welcome to last night: the weather is bad, which causes a plane to abort two takeoffs, which causes that plane to need emergency services. This increases the controller's workload beyond his capacity, so he accidentally clears the emergency vehicle to cross in front of a landing airplane, and they can't see the airplane because the weather is bad, so they follow the instruction and promptly get hit with an airplane.
When some bad weather can be the difference between "this is fine, one controller can handle it" and two dead pilots, you need to be staffed for bad weather.
That seems unusual to me. It’s common at smaller airports, but for a big one like LaGuardia I’d think tower and ground would be two different controllers, even lateish at night like this was. I know there has been a staffing problem for controllers in the NY area for some time.
Reddit aviation groups are full of professional pilots, saying how terrified they of flying into La Guardia or JFK, recounting close calls, with one saying how he avoided those two for 10 years...
It IS insane. Specially for LGA
It's absolutely understaffing.
But think of the money they saved by not having to pay another air traffic controller! A controller's yearly salary is the cost of about 10 seconds of the Iran war, based on the recently-reported figure of $11.3B for six days.
I don't think it's money. I think it's requirements and training pipeline restraints. The system is predicated on being able to throw bodies at the problem, but there is a distinct lack of qualified individuals to back that up. Personally, I didn't realize ATC as a possible career path until I was 36-- imagine my surprise when I found that I had already aged out.
Who would want to work that job once they find out what the day-to-day is like? I had an intern who looked at that out of the Air Force but he found out what you get paid and what the expectations are for the job and he figured he'd try his luck on something easier and better-paying like life-preserving medical devices. On a related note, why do you think nobody who you'd actually want teaching public school actually teaches public school in the US?
It’s not a money thing. It’s a shortage of people who are mentally able to do the job mixed with terrible hours and early forced retirements. ATC school has a failure rate of over 50 percent.
It's partially a money thing. ATC is under-compensated. They'd get more - and more talented - people interested if the money made up for the stress, hours, and early forced retirement.
> I'm not sure if they were the only controller working at the time, they continued working after the incident which seems unusual; my understanding is normally they'd be relieved by another controller
I remember late last year, couple of months ago, US ATC controllers were without pay but forced to work anyways (similar to TSA I suppose, although I don't think they were forced, but volunteered to work without salary), is that still the situation? Couldn't find any updates about that the situation been resolved, nor any updates that it's ongoing, if so though it feels like it'd be related to the amount of available controllers.
ATCs weren't exactly forced to work: they aren't slaves and are free to quit any time. But if they didn't show up for assigned shifts even though they weren't getting paid then they were subject to disciplinary action including termination. Some of them called in sick, or took on temporary second jobs to bring in some cash (obviously a bad thing from a fatigue management standpoint). After the government shutdown they were paid in arrears for all of the hours they worked. It's crazy that Congress plays political games with essential services like ATC.
The US has had trouble keeping enough controllers. It's a skilled but extremely stressful job, and so retention would always be difficult but the US also works hard to make it suck more than it should, and of course the over-work from not having enough people makes that even worse.
But no, AIUI only things that were somehow deemed part of "Homeland Security" are frozen, the TSA are part of Homeland Security but the ATC are under the FAA. So this particular partial government funding lapse wasn't causal, at least directly.
Utterly unqualified to suggest any causes (wait for the NTSB report on that), but couple compounding factors I've read elsewhere to begin to understand the situation and context:
- Another plane was out of position, grabbing some attention of the controller
- Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
- The colliding plane didn't have "explicit" landing clearance, but a "follow previous plane and land the same way unless told otherwise" implicit landing clearance. In Europe, planes need an explicit landing clearance, the act of granting it may have brought attention to the runway contention. US implicit system (arguably) is a bit more efficient, debate will now be is it worth it (pilots are now required to read back instructions because of past blood... will this result in same thing?)
- This was around midnight and apparently a little foggy, making visual contacts harder
Remember folks, disasters like this are rarely caused by a single factor. NTSB reports are excellent post-mortems that look at all contributing factors and analyze how they compounded into failure. Be human here.
In the USA at controlled airports, aircraft also need explicit landing clearance.
"Jazz 646, number 2, cleared to land 4."
https://youtu.be/Pbm-QJAAzNY?si=h3VEuVNLMf9Z8D1c&t=126
They did have a very explicit clearance.
The controller said “truck 1 stop” that is not ambiguous.
I’m always staggered by how stressed and tbh (not necessarily their fault given the circumstances) unprofessional US ATCs sound.
Sharp contrast with Europeans
In Europe is illegal to capture and publish ATC. I wonder why. Anyway I do not know what are you comparing.
From pilot friends, in best case I would say a big “depends” in some countries are very unprofessional, in others very professional (anyway total unfair generalization). There were already accidents because of that, for example because the twr communicated with locals in non english, so not everybody was at the same page.
Was curious if ground vehicles at airports also use transponders to communicate position to the radio tower, and it turns out the FAA put out a report last year on potential solutions to avoid this exact situation:
https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/certalerts/part_...
Many airports have ADS-B transponders in their ground vehicles. You can see them on flightradar or adsbexchange.
> Was curious if ground vehicles at airports also use transponders to communicate position […]
They do at CYYZ (Toronto Pearson):
* https://www.flightradar24.com/43.68,-79.63/13 (zoomed in)
* https://www.flightradar24.com/airport/yyz
Also at CYUL (Montreal Trudeau) and CYVR (Vancouver International).
Ground vehicles with transponders: https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=Planes&zoom=7&lat=42.1262&lng=...
Or just do like the rest of the world. No anticipated clearences to land, you only ever get a clerance when the runway is empty and yours.
I think this is a good idea.
The only negative I can think of is that it will generally involve accepting and responding to clearances on short final. I think adding more tasks to that critical stage of flight probably increases danger a little. Especially for low time student pilots like myself. That's particularly relevant in the U.S. because we have a higher percentage of student and private pilots than most of the world.
Overall, though, I'm fully convinced this would be safer.
Even without anticipated clearance to land you have to define what "the runway is empty and yours" means.
Yeah that gut wrenched ATC had to stay on point and ensure the next plane to land did a go around. Scary stuff.
Us lot have more people doing SRE ensuring p99 10ms for something frankly way less important. It is a nuts world.
LaGuardia has that system, it still failed to prevent this
Transponder doesn't alter the laws of physics for the landing plane you just cut off. I guess it gives ATC a ~5sec jump on telling some other flight to go around.
I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
The trajectory of the plane is obvious enough that it should be able to predict where it will likely be in 30 seconds or a minute. You can't cheat physics, if it is going down in direction of runway, it is landing or at worst will do go-around, so the services should be alterted runway is no-go automatically
> I'd bet a lot of money that however the system is implemented the police and fire get special treatment when it comes to process (i.e. asking permission before they go somewhere planes might be) and that is part of what lead to this.
I highly doubt that any system would intentionally give ground vehicles of any kind special treatment on an active runway.
Emergency vehicles were en route to another emergency in progress on the other runway. Sadly it sounds like a fire truck was cleared to cross the active runway moments before the CRJ landed. By the time the controller realized that mistake it was too late.
I'm very, very curious about whether the ARFF crew visually cleared the runway and final before crossing the hold short line. It's standard procedure for flight crew to do this, specifically to mitigate the risk of ATC errors.
Reports are there were fog and rain at La Guardia at the time of the incident. They were on a short final, and it’s entirely possible they were not visible to the fire truck’s crew.
At night with multiple runways it can be very hard to see a plane on final.
Still, I'm always hesitant to cross an active runway.
Yes ARFF should still look before crossing, but the weather wasn’t great with limited visibility and thus even if they looked it’s possible they didn’t see anything.
I mean, isn't it obvious that they didn't?
It’s obvious that either they didn’t, or they did but they didn’t see the plane. We don’t know which.
https://www.avherald.com/h?article=536bb98e
> Captain and first officer are reported to have died in the accident, two fire fighters on board of the truck received serious injuries, 13 passengers received injuries.
https://x.com/thenewarea51/status/2035926457394876837
ATC audio
make a mistake, recognize it, and then have to continue on your job, knowing you likely just killed people, because if you don't others will die.
The weight of some jobs is immense, and our civilization relies upon workers to shoulder the burden everyday.
And these guys are tremendously overworked because the government can’t get its shit together to hire enough people to staff at appropriate levels.
Another option: they shouldn't be government employees at all. It would be much better for them to work for the actual airports themselves and be certified by the government or a private testing organization instead.
LaGuardia, like many (most?) airports, is run by the government. This is a distinction without a difference, at least in this case.
Which government? State, Federal, City, or a Port Commission? There is in fact a significant distinction between the responsibilities and capabilities of each of these levels of government and you can't lump them all together. My home airport is operated by a port commission, which is government, but the port commission's task is to operate the ports.
There’s a lot of ATC that isn’t specific to a single airport. And lots of airports are owned by a government anyway.
"Government"? Let's call it what it is. ITYM "Republicans".
The shortage of ATC staff dates back to the Clinton Administration. It’s just hard to attract people into a 5+ year training program for a very stressful job where you might get bounced near the end with no payout and no transferrable job skills.
No the shortage goes back to Regan when their justified strike was busted. It ended the PATCO “union” and was a negative turning point for labour unions in general.
I think you mean Reagan. He removed the union for the ATC not Clinton.
Honestly, you can generally just blame Reagan for about anything. A presidency about weaking labor, strengthening Iran, and ballooning the deficit is uh never going to leave good traces.
Reagan did the right thing in that case. Government employees should never have collective bargaining rights. Public employee unions are contrary to the interests of taxpayers.
Centralization of all power in the government is also contrary to the interests of the taxpayers.
Every time i see an anti-union article, its usually about unions that do good union things...
But noone ever complains about the police union. It's always the public goods people like ATC or teachers.
Over the course of the past year, I think we've seen more evidence that the federal workforce's collective bargaining rights aren't strong enough. Workers' employment contracts are being ignored, employees are being threatened, constructively terminated, all in an attempt to enact RIFs without following the law.
Things are happening to the federal workforce right now that aren't even legal in the private sector.
If contracts are violated then the impacted parties can seek redress through the courts. Government employee unions aren't needed for that.
You have to have your contract violated for a significant amount before you can notionally afford to hire a lawyer to fight it out. Below 5 figures it doesn't make much financial sense to do that for most people, so they just eat it instead. It's how a lot of "theft of wages" and other mistreatment happens so often. Lawyers don't take those cases for free, and court isn't free either. And you're not going to instantly appear at the top of the docket for something small like that especially if the government buries you in procedure. They can do that for years.
But sure, yeah you can seek redress through the courts.
Suing the federal government solo is an insurmountable task for most people -- even more so while they're being constructively terminated. Employee unions have been suing on their workers behalf over the past year, but the executive branch can drag out federal trials for a lot longer than people can stay without a job.
Public employee unions are contrary to the interests of taxpayers
This is not obvious on its face, but also, paying taxes is not my only concern wrt the civil society in which I live.
Does your comment also include the police union(s)?
Yes absolutely. They're a perfect example of the unique issues w/ collective bargaining for public services.
Yes, absolutely. No government employees should ever have collective bargaining rights. If they want better wages and working conditions then they can advocate for those through the political process, the same as any other citizen.
Collective bargaining rights shouldn’t even be a separate thing. They’re just a natural consequence of the fact that free speech is protected and slavery is illegal. The idea of an illegal strike is bizarre.
Somehow Europe manages to do that well enough.
ATC/GTC seems like a really strong candidate for partial automation with recent advances in AI. Obviously we'd still want some expert humans in the loop for exceptional situations, but I have to imagine there's a way to significantly reduce the cognitive burden/stress for these folks.
Recent advances in AI aren't useful for routine operations in safety critical domains such as aviation because we don't know how to verify and test them. An LLM is effectively an unpredictable black box with unknown failure modes. There is opportunity for greater automation but probably based on classical deterministic programming.
Yes. Reagan was a Republican.
No, I mean government. This has been a problem for a long time and there hasn't been any serious effort to improve the situation by anyone.
Yup, it's been a problem ever since Regan (a Republican) fired over 11,000 ATC employees. And by "anyone" ITYM "republicans" again, because Democrats have been trying for years.
See this article from 2017: https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2017/06/house-democrats-in...
I'm curious about what kind of visualization does the ATC have at the disposal about the current occupancy of the individual tarmac segments? I'd assume if an airplane is approaching for landing on a specific runway, that runway should have been clearly marked as restricted for access until the plane would actually land and clear it?
In the US, airplanes can be cleared for landing while the runway is occupied (you can be number two, three, etc. for landing and still be cleared). It's different in other countries, where you can only be issued a landing clearance if the runway is clear or anticipated to be clear before you land (e.g. the plane before you is already exiting the runway).
Still, the runway could be reserved for landing aircrafts only, still preventing access to all other types of vehicles.
How are fire trucks supposed to respond to incidents involving airplanes, as it appears this case involves, if the runway is off limits to them?
The way it's supposed to work, the ground controller first verifies that there are no traffic conflicts before clearing vehicles to cross an active runway.
Which is exactly what failed here, so saying "it shouldn't fail by not failing" doesn't help terribly much.
Having grade-separate crossings for vehicles might, but that introduces new issues (plane skidding off runway could hit the incline and break up).
O’Hare has those but it’s not helpful for emergencies that happen on the runway itself.
That's a huge amount of damage even at 24mph. It's crazy how that could happen though. Will be interesting to see the full report.
The fire truck was flipped and moved to the side of the runway, this was not 24mph. 24mph is the final groundspeed recorded after the aircraft skidded off of the runway.
Per the ADSBx track the plane was at 101kts (115 mph / 185kph) just before crossing taxiway D, which would be where it hit the firetruck. It still had enough energy afterwards to reach taxiway E, 600ft away.
Okay that makes far more sense the article didn’t really make that clear to me.
The results seem on the high end but they check out at first glance.
A plane is basically a flimsy tube. A firetruck is a solid brick comparatively. The plane out weighs the fire truck by a lot and out speeds it by a lot. So yeah, destroying the whole front of the plane to punt the truck it sounds about right for a 25 on 5 or 35 on 10/15 type rear ending to me. Flipping doesn't really sound that unreasonable considering that the plane made contact with the top of the truck (just by virtue of comparative height) and contact may not have been straight on. Even if it left the pavement on it's wheels airport firefighters aren't exactly who I'd bet on (they're middle of the pack) to keep the truck on it's wheels if they got surprise kicked off the road especially if there's an embankment involved.
A CRJ 9000 is 70000 lbs empty, 84500 lbs MTOW.
An Oshkosh 1500 4x4 is 62000 lbs GVWR (wiki says kerb weight but it’s incorrect).
The plane was landing and the truck was heading to an intervention, so they were likely close to empty and to GVWR respectively.
And again, 25mph is the final ground speed, after the plane punted the truck and kept on going for 600ft.
>25mph is the final ground speed
Wouldn't final ground speed be zero?
Final ground speed reported.
Pause the video at 13 sec. That firetruck is awfully intact for something that allegedly got hit at high speed. Basically just a bunch of top side sheetmetal damage (concentrated to the rear, obviously). In any case it didn't even get sent hard enough to screw up the cab exterior. And on the flip side, if you keep cranking the speed up you start getting to where the plane starts looking too suspiciously intact. There's just not much room to work backwards from the apparent results and get a high difference in speed or get very high initial speeds (100 onto 75 or whatever). If the plane was going fast the truck had to be going fast too or there'd be more carnage. But if they were both going fast you'd expect more damage from the after the fact barrel roll and the plane and truck to be a little farther apart in distance.
Fire truck is filled to brim with gear and doesn't care all that much about weight, plane is the opposite of that, lightness is money, so it makes sense fire truck looks better after crash than plane
Where’s the video you’re referring to?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HEFF17eaYAA_sgq?format=jpg
I can’t tell what’s the truck and what’s the remains of the plane in this pic.
Another wider angle:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HEFDcS4bwAA8uu7?format=png&name=...
There’s no way this scene happens from a plane colliding with a truck at 24mph.
I'm talking about the headline video from TFA.
The back of a firetruck is not a working implement like a dump truck is nor is it sufficiently strong for mounting a crane or man bucket like utility bodies often are It's a bunch of sheetmetal boxes to hold stuff and cover stuff and there's a water tank back there somewhere. In the middle down low some pumps are buried. Basically don't think of it as being any more structural than a box truck body because it's not. All that stuff got shredded, obviously, since they're only really meant to bear their own weight and were subject to all the truck tossing forces here. Beyond that the truck is in pretty good shape. It's not uncommon for a good "off the highway and into the ditch" crash to rip tandems off, twist frames, etc. None of that has happened here. The plane is pretty rough, but that's expected. They are 100% tin cans. Ground equipment moving at idle speeds will absolutely shred them before the operator even feels resistance. A goose hit square on the leading edge of a small jet's wing will put a massive dent in (and apply red paint, lol).
24 sounds about right for a closing speed for plane onto truck. Whatever the baseline speed of the truck was cannot have been that high or the truck would be absolutely shredded from the barrel roll and as it stand the cab is barely pushed in.
The article dropped the speed claim.
The last recorded ground speed data of 24mph also shows a wildly different heading (going from 30deg ish to 170ish). So it probably happened after the collision and was part of its deceleration. As far as I know, the truck would have been crossing the runway so the effective speed perpendicular to the plane would be zero except for directional shear I guess.
> That's a huge amount of damage even at 24mph.
The speed was much higher per sibling comment, but also remember that kinetic energy also involves mass (planes are heavy) and the square of the velocity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy
The latter is why (e.g.) going 100 units/hour has twice the KE of going 70 units/hour in a car.
It looks like that is based on the last recorded speed from flightradar24[1] which was 21kts(24mph). The previous data points were 11kts, and 58 kts(the last point before the track deviates off the runway). I do think it is likely that the collision occurred at a speed faster than 24mph.
edit: Looking into this a bit more it looks like the plane came to a stop around crossing E while the emergency vehicle was crossing at D(based on ATC recordings). Using the following map as reference[2], the 58kts point was around E, while the previous recorded point which was just before D was 114kts.
[1] https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/ac8646#3ede6c39
[2] https://www.flightaware.com/resources/airport/LGA/APD/AIRPOR...
Very unlikely it was 24mph…The entire cockpit is gone.
(Though some of the major damage may have happened while deplaning the passengers)
On other hand planes are really not designed to be crashed into things. Only for limited impacts. So we might not have right comparison for relatively thin and aimed to be light structure being impacted by bulkier object.
Speed doesn't cause damage. Momentum causes damage. We understand speed, we do not understand momentum. It makes sense given our evolution.
People into boats need to understand this. Even a boat that travels no more than 4mph can crush you easily. This is why you never get on to moving boat from the front. Many people have made a mistake because speed is not high.
Tugboats bump other boats all day. Hundred thousand pound pieces of machinery bury themselves into the dirt. All this as part of normal operation. It's not that simple.
Speed, kinetic energy and acceleration are all interrelated and at the end of the day it's all forces (to some extent) and no amount of hand wringing commentary is going to replace genuine understanding of them.
How did it end up like that with the nose up: what is holding it up?
Gravity. The aircraft is heavier at the back, where the engines are. With the nose severely damaged/missing, the centre of gravity has shifted aft, so what’s left of the nose is sticking up in the air.
Front fell off, people deplaned (while still horizontal) which shifted the balance backwards. It’s sitting on the rear bulkhead,
I guess there is more weight in the relatively small section of the front that came off than I expected
It's balance, you don't need a large difference in weight for it to tilt backwards.
I’d guess the front landing gear assembly is going to be fairly heavy, and appears to be missing. This model of plane also has its engines at the rear, not under the wing, which will move the balance to the back.
Oh yeah that definitely makes sense
Planes typically have their center of gravity just forward of the rear wheels. This makes it easier to rotate on takeoff.
The margins are thin enough that certain planes will sometimes have people in the back get off first, before the people on the front, to avoid tipping onto the tail like this.
According to other news sources, the pilots lost their lives here, too.
The entire cockpit, front toilet and galley area, and probably a front row seat have all been utterly destroyed. Unfortunately I'd be amazed if the death toll stays at two.
Are the increased number of air incidents since Dec 2024 reflective of anything real or is it more attention on something? Brigida v. USDOT comes to mind but doesn't seem relevant. I'm sure we could all construct a chain of "this thing happened that caused that which caused this" and so on, but I'm curious if someone has done the effort to see whether such a chain is defensible.
Also, did the pilots die in the collision or in some sort of aftermath? The cockpit looks absolutely smashed.
You can probably construct a realistic chain of failure that goes all the way back to political tomfoolery and bad air traffic control leadership/staffing decisions, but that makes the wrong people look bad, so they'll probably blame individuals further down the totem pole like the controller or pilot and call it a day.
It should be noted that aircraft and all other vehicle and personel movements on an airport are controlled from the airtraffic control tower by air traffic controllers or directly by individual flaggers, as directed from the tower. Or at least thats the way it is supposed to work, and of course the operation at a place like LaGuardia is more complex, and will have specialists and multiple zones. What will put an extra edge on this is the whole ICE thing, and airport chaos pulling the roof down.
> What will put an extra edge on this is the whole ICE thing, and airport chaos pulling the roof down.
How would the ICE thing cause more ground traffic collisions. Are you thinking ATC controllers are illegal immigrants and they’re going to run away during their shift? I just don’t see a connection there…
Not the crash, but the aftermath. Passengers will be showing up for flights today, nervous with the crash on their minds, and many will then encounter untrained goons cosplaying as airport security.
I could see that, yeah.
This incident caused delays and cancellations that ripple throughout an already understaffed network of TSA checkpoints. ICE presence will make airport security somehow an even worse experience for brown people.
The comments in /r/aviation see to think it’s a one (tired) man show at night.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1s16x61/comment/o...
Yet another blow to the confidence of flying in this country.
More accurately, the risk has increased by at least one order of magnitude, but the confidence of the public has largely stayed the same.
This comes to mind how during the Boeing news scandals, commenters would confidently argue "Flying is still ridiculously safe, statistically speaking", "these things happen every day, just underreported", and "you/people are irrational for not flying Boeing". It's a very curious argument to me. Is the ATC infrastructure issue analogous or not, etc.
You can view the actual data and control for your own recency bias one way or the other. I see data from 2005 - 2024 trivially accessible.
https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/Pages/research.aspx
Maybe US media, hardly an unbiased news source about US events, especially when hundreds of billions are flying around about incompetent massive employer and lobbyist.
Nowhere else in the world you would hear such statements. Boeings simply disappeared from Europe, those few that were here before. I am sure they are still used somewhere but I haven't flown any in past 7-8 years. Heck, I haven't seen any in South east Asia neither (but that may be due to luck).
I check this with all bookings, no way I am flying that piece of shit if I can anyhow avoid that, not alone and quadruple that with family.
It is strange. What is importa t is, are things getting better or getting worse? As they say, it’s not the fall that kills, bit the impact. Are we falling?
> "I visited them both in the hospital, as has the chairman, and they were able to speak and we're notifying their families," said Garcia.
Let's get the important parts out of the way first: We in charge have taken care of optics, with regard to our offices.
Oh, and we're going to contact families eventually.
I saw the first post about this on /r/flying and /r/aviation 5 hours ago and legacy media is only started reporting it in the last hour or so
/r/xyz doesnt need to fact check. Sure those are excellent subs but just being watering holes and not legal entities they can move faster. There were some wrong facts on r/aviation although it got viral so people just ploughed in with whatever news outlet they read it on.
I have seen a lot of first posts on social media which have been wrong
Nope.
CNN, CNBC, NYPost, Guardian all had stories up quickly, or around an hour. There are others too.
UPDATED:
Down-votes happen but disappointing since I'm stating facts. Heres some backup:
The user haunter said media started reporting around ~4 AM EST (based on timestamps).
The accident happened at 11:40 PM EST. Story publish times across a sample of various legacy/mainstream media orgs:
There are others.Is this a dig on legacy media? Do we expect people to be up all hours of the day reporting the news?
I got a NYT alert about this around 3:30am EDT.
Yes. Yes, we do. I expect a competent news agency to have a night desk.
Why though? To report to the people who are asleep?
And so much of the legacy media info is wrong. It’s strange because a lot of the primary sources are public.
This is a good overview so far:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8vokLcNNGCM
Very informative, thanks for the link!
ATC audio is https://archive.liveatc.net/klga/KLGA-Twr-Mar-23-2026-0330Z....
The clearance for AC8646 to land on runway 4 is given in a sequence starting at 4:58. "Vehicle needs to cross the runway" at 6:43. Truck 1 and company asks for clearance to cross 4 at 6:53. Clearance is granted at 7:00. Then ATC asks both a Frontier and Truck 1 to stop, voice is hurried and it's confusing.
> And so much of the legacy media info is wrong. It’s strange because a lot of the primary sources are public.
You should provide sources for a claim like that. For example, what in the BBC article is wrong?
If only we could diff the BBC article (it currently says it was posted 21 mins ago which is younger than your comment…). It’s changed multiple times now without any kind of changelog or acknowledgement.
> Video footage on social media showed the aircraft, which is operated by Air Canada's regional partner Jazz aviation, coming to a rest with its nose upturned.
This just isn’t true. There’s no video of the plane coming to a rest with its nose upturned (which implies motion). The upturned nose happened only after passengers deplaned and the balance shifted.
> It had slowed to about 24mph when it collided with a vehicle from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.
This is the next part that will change. Just because some of the last broadcast data said 24mph doesn’t mean that’s the speed it was when it collided with the truck. The truck is on its side and those passengers are in hospital. The pilots are dead. The plane sustained enough structural damage to have the entire nose collapse. If the sentence is based on that broadcast data, SAY THAT instead of printing it as fact.
And with all the quotes from social media posts from key groups, link to them instead of just vaguely quoting.
EDIT:
As expected, they got rid of the above paragraph claiming the speed. It now says:
“The plane was arriving from Montreal and had landed, before colliding with the vehicle from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.”
Any of us can help log the changes by submitting revisions of the article to web.archive.org
With a fast-changing news story where vague/incomplete/conflicting details emerge in the first few hours it's not unreasonable for the first few revisions to be like that, and eventually gets fixed hours or a day later.
I think that’s what’s critical here. Post details and their sources to show that they are in flux. Don't write them as fact and then make secret edits.
Typically most primary sources are public.
It's hardly worth checking with the legacy media anymore. Really, why bother?
Why bother with the facts when you're already heard all the gossip?
At the very least it’s worth reading to see what most people / the people in power are reading or want others to read.
The NYT is biased, but it’s still basically the most official newspaper of the American ruling class.
Because some of them still have standards. They will correct themselves if something was wrong.
Everyone can write a comment on Reddit / make a podcast / video / whatever claiming whatever they want. Unless you already know and trust them (which requires you to be able to cross-check their information), it's potentially as useful as a random LLM hallucination. Could be brilliantly spot on, or could be completely nonsense. No way of knowing unless you already know enough. (Because even cross-checking won't necessarily save you, if you cross-check multiple bullshit sources).
Media with standards (like the BBC, Guardian, Liberation, etc.) will do their best to report truthfully (even if sometimes with some bias), and will fix their mistakes if they're caught later on or the story evolves. Independent media checking organisations have shown time and time again that there is trustworthy media, you just need to know which it is, and always take a pinch of salt. It's wild to me that people will just dismiss rags such as Fox News and relatively quality media like Guardian in the same breath.
Avoidable catastrophes indiced as a measurement of cultural decline?
Introduce a foreign object onto the runway and it will inevitably collide with an aircraft. The fire trucks aren't part of the airport traffic management system, their sudden presence is bound to lead to problems eventually.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the truck has a single radio (airplanes always have two) and was constantly switching between ATC and fire house frequencies. The probably never heard the "stop, stop, stop stop.."
It would also not surprise me if airports previously had dedicated fire services, which have since been outsourced for cost reasons.
This is an airport-specific vehicle that was on radio with ATC at the time and had clearance to cross the runway. Nothing in your comment is correct.
According to this article, the air traffic controller gave the fire truck permission to cross the runway. So, it seems like they are part of the air traffic management system?