alt Hacker News> https://www.airlinepilotforums.com/major/152572-aircraft-fir...
Just a quick read/speculation based on the linked forum post...
Short of insane visibility conditions that prevented them from seeing the plane coming, the firetruck operator seems to be the liable party (beyond the airport for understaffing controllers—this seems to be exacerbated by government cuts but that's still no excuse for having a solo controller at that busy of an airport, especially at night).
The controller in question seems to have caught their mistake quickly and reversed the order instead asking the firetruck to stop (but for some reason, this wasn't heard).
Is it common now to have solo operators running control towers?
Replies
"Liability" isn't really how we try to see things in aviation. While it's true that it's ultimately considered the responsibility of the truck/plane to visually confirm that crossing the runway is safe, refuse unsafe commands from ATC, and comply to the best of their ability when ATC says "stop" at the last second, we can't stop our analysis there if we want to prevent this from happening in the future, because unless things change someone will make this mistake again in the future. Telling people not to make mistakes isn't going to help at all; it's obvious, and no one wants to cause an accident. The error is just the last step in the process that led to the collision.
The controller was talking to Frontier plane when he first said stop, then said stopstopTruck1stopstopstop and it would be easy for there to be a gap in processing for the driver of truck 1 because the verbiage all flowed in the same stanza that was started when addressing the Frontier flight.
> Is it common now to have solo operators running control towers?
At Class D airports it’s always been the norm. But KLGA is Class B.
Truck was on a different frequency from the aircraft so they couldn’t even hear each others’ clearances.
Also first time ATC told the truck to stop it wasn’t too clear who the message was addressed to. It’s a bit hard to hear “Truck1” there, not clear who he wants to stop. The second time, one can argue by the time “stop” command was heard it might have been better to gun the engine. As the truck sort of slowed down in the middle of the runway.
> this seems to be exacerbated by government cuts
What government cuts? 2025 FAA air traffic budget was up around 7% from 2025
https://enotrans.org/article/senate-bill-oks-27-billion-faa-...
I've seen the NTSB footage of the plane and helicopter crash in Washington. It is practically impossible to discern a landing plane over the lights of a big city at night. Next, the truck had been angled away from the plane approach, so it was coming from the right side (passenger side) and at back. There was zero chance that firetruck could have seen the plane in the seconds it covered hundreds of meters, flying at 200+ km/h. And also in that NTSB investigation there was a case of missed comms, when ATC recording clearly showed controller saying an important word, but it jot "jammed" in the process and there was silence at the receiving end instead of that word (in the middle of the transmission). Not saying it was a case here, but it is possible too.
Just like in that collision, it is possible there is no one single person to blame (apparently helicopter pilot was not outside of the legal corridor, despite the speculations), but it was a compounding error issue.