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.
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.
There have been many attempts to change phraseology, teach pilots and controllers to always readback runways, etc. but nothing that actually prevents the issue from occurring entirely via automation.
The union pretty loudly and early on pointed out major problems with that job and the response of ignoring them for 4 decades is what's driven us to the current situation.
A union that isn't allowed to legally strike when needed isn't a useful union though. The state that ATC has been in for the decades after that suggests to me that they were correct to strike.
Clearly human-run ATC results in situations like this, so the idea that automated ATC could result in a runway collision and should therefore never be implemented is bad.
You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there forever, and not enough humans on the ground to manually land them.
Now image the outage is also happening at all airports nearby, preventing planes from diverting.
How do you get the planes out of the sky? Not enough humans to do it manually.
Now imagine the system comes back online. Does it know how to handle a crisis scenario where you have dozens of planes overhead, each about to run out of fuel? Hopefully someone thought of that edge case.
My suggestion is to restrict the use of smaller jets like crj and turboprops. I know airports like LaGuardia can't handle the big jets either, but they could reduce the slots and require a jet that holds, say, 150 people or more. This would result in fewer flights per day to some airports, but reduce overall congestion while still serving the same number of passengers.
I feel the same way about close calls on the road, especially ones involving a vehicle and a vulnerable road user like a pedestrian or cyclist. Way too many lives being saved by a person jumping out of the way at the last minute who shouldn't have had to do so, and then cops and bureaucrats shrugging with "well what do you want us to do, the numbers don't show enough fatalities here for it to be worth fixing".
Literally the crash here was caused by a fire truck entering the runway.
No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
People are saying automation could handle a significant portion of the routine things allowing humans to handle the more complex/finicky issues.
Even if automation could handle 10% of the most common situations it would be a huge boon. In reality its probably closer to 50%.
If the reason you have the human there is to handle the unusual cases, you run the real risk that they just aren't paying attention at critical moments when they need to pay attention.
It's pretty similar to the problem with L3 autonomous driving.
Probably the sweet spot is automation which makes clear the current set of instructions on the airport which also red flags when a dangerous scenario is created. I believe that already exists, but it's software that was last written in 1995 or so.
Regardless, before any sort of new automation could be deployed, we need slack for the ATC to be able to adopt a new system. That's the biggest pressing problem. We could create the perfect software for ATC, but if the current air traffic controllers are all working overtime and doing a job designed for 3 people rather than one, they simply won't have the time to explore and understand that new system. It'll get in the way rather than solve a problem. More money is part of the solution here, but we also need a revamped ATC training program which can help to fill the current hole.
Very possibly. It will be interesting what comes from the investigation.
> No one here or anywhere is saying automation would solve or be able to handle everything that human operators handle, that's an argument you invented that no one is making.
I’m asking if it would have solved even the current situation. The truck presumably saw the red light, and was asking to cross. Would traffic control have said no if more had been automated and if so, what automation would fix this? Unless we are supposing the truck would be autonomously driven and refuse to proceed when planes are landing, in which case, maybe, though that’s not really ATC automation anymore.
Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.
Even if most of the work is routine, you definitely still want a human in the loop.
This isn't a Kubernetes cluster where you can add VMs in 30 seconds.
....if they go around kilometer of the runway the fire will turn into bigger fire
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.
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 within arm's reach of 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.
That was my first comment in this thread, so there was no established goal to change. My sole goal was to clarify the meaning of an idiom that the comment I was replying to was misstating.
I even included a disclaimer that "This comment isn't a judgment of this specific case", so I don't know how you could have received it as such.
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.
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.
The guy was alone operating 2 frequencies, had an emergency of another aircraft going on… is not so easy as many commenters from the armchair are insinuating
(See my other comment below if you're tempted to say something about visibility.)
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.
I also wonder if you're down to a "one controller" scenario if it would be better for there to be once frequency, not a ground/air split.
In this case, from the available information, the drivers of the fire truck thought they were cleared, and proceeded to cross while a plane was cleared to land. I'm not familiar with ATC ground radio to know if they were actually cleared or not, but it seems clear that that the drivers thought they were cleared.
Investigation reports will give us more details.
CPDLC is already being deployed domestically. It's currently available to all operators in en route segments.
All runway incursions at towered airports are reported, classified according to risk, and investigated.
I wouldn't be so quick to rule out that there's some kind of relatively easy technological double check that could greatly reduce incidents. The fact that we've not gotten there despite years of effort to reduce runway incursions doesn't mean that it's not possible.
But calling a replacement of major ATC functions with software a "simple fix" is a perfect illustration of why this is a bad idea. Nothing about human-rated safety-critical software is simple, and coming at it with the attitude that it is? In my view, as an experienced pilot, flight instructor, spacecraft operator, and software engineer, that thinking is utterly disqualifying.
Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL, which didn't prevent this accident.
> Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL
It'll be interesting to hear why RWSL didn't help, as it is supposedly deployed at LGA.
Yes, I know it probably costs $300k, surely today you can have a $10k ground version.
You could also show every plane on a screen inside the vehicle and have some loud alarms if they are on a collision path.
You could even just display FlightRadar24, still better than nothing.
You would still get permission for the tower, this would not be an allow system, just a deny system.
Ok, let's not try improving systems, how's that working out?
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.
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...
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.
I'm gonna guess that code never went into production. The problem seems easy until you start looking under the hood.
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 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?
How many runways crossings are there in a year? How much is "1700+" a percentage of that total?
FAA defines it as "Any occurrence at an aerodrome involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on the protected area of a surface designated for the landing and take off of aircraft." [0]
Many runway incursions run no risk of any accident, but are still flagged as issues, investigated, and punished if appropriate.
[0] https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/resources/runway_...
And the cost of investigating 1,700 should be within the budget.
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runway_incursion#Definition
* https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/resources/runway_...
All incursions (in the US) are tracked:
* https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/statistics
Given there are ~45,000 flights per days in the US (and so aircraft and vehicles would move hither and fro around an airport for each flight), 1700 feels like a small number.
Human can misspeak or mishear instructions, but if they were communicated and understood correctly (a read back was correct), but the pilot had a 'brain fart' and went forward instead of stopping, how do we eliminate brain farts?
See 5-2-5 for an example:
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html...
NOTE- Previous reviews of air traffic events, involving LUAW instructions, revealed that a significant number of pilots read back LUAW instructions correctly and departed without a takeoff clearance. LUAW instructions are not to be confused with a departure clearance; the outcome could be catastrophic, especially during intersecting runway operations.
The older term was "hold short runway X" and that was too close to "hold runway X" - the first meant do NOT enter the runway, the second meant enter and line up but do NOT takeoff.
We talk about Vision Zero for streets. Vision Zero is actually achievable in aviation.
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...
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.
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.
I read elsewhere that the plane was only going 24mph when it hit the truck, and I didn't understand how the collision could have been that damaging, but I wasn't taking into account how much momentum a plane would have at that speed. From the video, it seems like a plane moving on the ground acts less like a car or truck and more like a very delicate freight train when it hits something.
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".
Edit:- It's Atlanta.
The airspace that combines JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark, is the busiest airspace in the US.
Should they be combined at LGA when both (crossing) runways are in use, and there's an incident on the field? (The fire trucks were on their way to investigate a smell on the flight deck of another airplane that had to abort takeoff twice.)
I'd say hell no.
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.
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.
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.
So why the fuck would any talented individual choose to go work for the "Get an example made out of you" department, on top of the horrific stress of the actual job!?
The idea of a union that "isn't allowed" to strike is a joke. Next will be a union that has a max membership of 1!
It's a mess.
- 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.
"Jazz 646, number 2, cleared to land 4."
"stop stop stop, truck 1 stop stop stop" I mean maybe it was ambiguous for half a second but he pretty quickly said "truck 1 stop". I guess we'll have to wait for the sync up to see if it was too late to stop by then
The controller said “truck 1 stop” that is not ambiguous.
Sharp contrast with Europeans
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.
I can almost guarantee you the airplane was visible from taxiway D.
Still, I'm always hesitant to cross an active runway.
Source: Mentour Pilot. https://www.youtube.com/live/Bb4CcoK0KLM
https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/certalerts/part_...
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).
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.
Us lot have more people doing SRE ensuring p99 10ms for something frankly way less important. It is a nuts world.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Things are happening to the federal workforce right now that aren't even legal in the private sector.
But sure, yeah you can seek redress through the courts.
Maybe this is the one evidence-driven case where you can be open minded about the value of a public employee union?
This is not obvious on its face, but also, paying taxes is not my only concern wrt the civil society in which I live.
Ridiculous to see people acting like LLMs are a silver bullet for every problem without putting any thought into what that would actually look like.
See this article from 2017: https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2017/06/house-democrats-in...
"”The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican,” - Barack Obama [0]
[0] https://thehill.com/policy/finance/137156-obama-says-hed-be-...
Obama was a very moderate Democrat for his time. If you go back in time a moderate Democrat and Republican were similar because the "center" was more reasonable. Now the "center" is just people that are ashamed that they vote Republican.
But all private businesses have the same responsibilities and capabilities and therefore can be lumped together as one entity? The asymmetry in how you're critiquing the way this is discussed ends up revealing your bias.
Our civilization? Nah. Just that one shithole country. Greatest country in the world and they schedule a single guy to work both tower and ground frequencies at a major airport, it's almost like they're asking for this shit to happen.
And before anyone mentions understaffing, this literally one of the plethora of problems that the rest of the world figured out while the U.S. continues to act special.
Having grade-separate crossings for vehicles might, but that introduces new issues (plane skidding off runway could hit the incline and break up).
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.
Also, did the pilots die in the collision or in some sort of aftermath? The cockpit looks absolutely smashed.
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.
That is just simply false. There are many boeings flying in europe. Just by randomly clicking around on flightradar24 I found multiple right now in the air.
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…
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1s16x61/comment/o...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wouldn't final ground speed be zero?
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.
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.
* 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.
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...
(Though some of the major damage may have happened while deplaning the passengers)
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.
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.
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:
CNN - 12:47 AM
NYPost - 12:47 AM
The Guardian - 12:50 AM
Associated Press (AP) - 1:31 AM
Fox News - 1:47 AM
Newsweek - 2:24 AM
This is a good overview so far:
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.
You should provide sources for a claim like that. For example, what in the BBC article is wrong?
> 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.”
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.
The NYT is biased, but it’s still basically the most official newspaper of the American ruling class.
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.
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.