Biological Brown Medium brown with white stripes
Vacation Meaning Oh no. Did you not hear us when we told you not to drink the water?
2 people in an auto gyro strike a cable in Italy. It didn’t end well.
Because the controllers left early, traffic control was understaffed:
There were two controllers in the LGA tower the night of the crash but one controller was doing two jobs while the other controller was coordinating a different emergency, according to the NTSB. Two controllers were standard for this shift and time, a NTSB report in April noted.
Boy is that article a mess.
Well, are two standard or was there supposed to be more than two but some left early? Both those things can’t be simultaneously true.
“Leaving early because of staffing shortages is commonplace”. What the heck does that mean? People leaving early suggests you have more, not less, workers than needed. Unless you have some sort of management policy to overschedule workers then dynamically cut them to try to limit paid overtime.
And pure RW grandstanding by the trumpist DOT Secretary. Sounds exactly like Stalin’s time. Something bad happened, and it must be the fault of individual saboteurs, not the wonderful perfect system we have.
Leaving early depends on company policy. Billing for hrs not worked is a different issue and generally accountable if it goes against that policy.
A serious, preventable, aviation accident occurred during their absence that resulted in 2 fatalities. As with most fatal aviation accidents, it looks like it was the result of a series of events. That includes controllers leaving early.
Didn’t they leave early with their supervisors permission? If so, then it should be tge supervisor’s fault & not the workers
Yeah, there’s gotta be more to that story, or something they left out more likely.
I agree. Who approved leaving early. Were work hours not adjusted accordingly. If they weren’t needed than why were they scheduled in the first place?
'Zactly. Something is missing from either the NTSB’s preliminary report, or is missing from the article. Or both.
This is a better article - there were four & two left early, leaving two.
This is a free article until Sep 8, a week from now:
I am surprised to learn that Boeing still offers the integral airstairs even on new MAXes. If you’d have asked me I’d have said those went away after the 737 Original (-100 & -200) or at latest the Classic (-300 through -500). I’ve not seen one in the wild since I was kid riding AirCal’s 737-200s.
From the git-go, they’re rickety, mechanically complex, and kinda adventurous to climb up or down. Risk that was acceptable in 1965 isn’t so much in 2025.
It’s also interesting to me how much the whole airplane was designed around the presumed absolute necessity for those stairs back in 1965 when the 737 was conceived as a short range RJ for Europe’s many under-equipped 3rd rate airports. Now we’re flying MAXes on ETOPS to Hawaii.
The unusually short landing gear was so the biggest stairs they could stuff in there would be long enough to reach the ground. And even then, they do so at a steep angle. That short gear has been the bane of the 737 program’s existence ever since. A real tail that has wagged its dog for over a half century now.
Aside from the rear stairs on the 727, which I’ve seen and used, I’ve never seen airstairs on a passenger jet.
The DC-9 / MD-80 had them as an option too. Same basic setup mechanically.
Late 50s - early 60s lots of turboprops or ICE smaller airliners had them. Often with the top few steps built right into the inside face of the front door which was hinged at the bottom.
Lotta bizjets like that still, but not much else.
I’ve seen them on RJs – when I worked for Intel the company had a small fleet of ERJs they used as corporate shuttles. They flew scheduled routes between some of the bigger campuses on the West Coast, and any employee with a need to travel to another site could fly on them. Those jets had the built in stairs, as they mostly flew to GA airports with no jetbridges or mobile stairs.
I will grant you, I can’t recall seeing them on a commercial RJ, but I assume they were available as an option if an airline wanted them.
There’s a movie about a hijacking that shows the stairs on a 737 being extended. I know that plane was designed with features like that to serve airports without all the infrastructure we take for granted now. I’m surprised it’s still an available option, but I suppose that once Boeing went to the trouble to certify it they may as well keep all the plans and tooling around just in case a customer wants it.
I’m pretty sure Boeing keeps it around specifically because Ryanair wants it. I could be remembering wrong, but I think I remember reading somewhere that Boeing wanted to kill the airstair option on the Max, but Ryanair insisted on having them. I guess it helps them keep their costs down by not having to pay to use jetbridges and airstairs from the airport. And I would imagine maybe some of the airports they serve actually don’t have that infrastructure, since they like to serve “secondary” airports.
But do they work for disabled passengers?
Apparently, for disabled passengers they use a specialized elevator truck called an “ambulift”, which passengers must request in advance. From the pictures I found on Google, it looks pretty similar to an airport catering truck where the rear compartment can be raised up on hydraulic lifts.
Note there are a lot of the elderly who can walk OK on flat surfaces or gently rising ramps–but have trouble with stairs.
There’s always a way to deal w the wheelchair set. As you say, the harder part are the vastly more numerous semi-ambulatory who can kinda shuffle-walk & maybe drag wheelies sloooowly, but not up stairs.
Lotta places wo jetbridges now have boarding ramps. Like traditional boarding stairs they’re large wheeled carts dragged by manpower or a pickup truck. They mate to the aircraft door. But unlike stairs they have a long shallow ramp with 1 or 2 180 degree turn(s) in the middle to get to / from the ground. Rather sophisticated example:
Half the Caribbean tourist destinations use these. Vail Colorado too. They’re more fun on a sunny day that’s not too hot or cold.