Air traffic controller’s ‘I messed up’ highlights human limits — but experts urge caution

Twenty seconds and a whole world passed between the moment a fire truck was cleared to cross Runway 4 at LaGuardia airport in New York on Sunday night and the instant it was plowed into by an Air Canada flight that had been cleared to land, killing the two pilots. 

What happened in that third of a minute is now mostly public through the release of stark audio of an air traffic controller frantically trying to correct the mistake of letting the truck and the plane onto the same strip of runway.

Whether the same person made those two decisions and communicated them is still unclear. 

The recording reveals the anguish of a calamity the controller tried to correct within that brief period. What it doesn’t reveal is everything that led to the moment and the pressures and limits of task saturation in a timeframe that included another flight emergency.

“I tried to reach out to my staff. And we were dealing with an emergency earlier. I messed up,” he can be heard telling another controller afterwards.

The weight of a single sentence

Those last three words quickly became one of the most haunting elements of the crash that killed two Canadian pilots and injured dozens more. Aviation experts warn they risk oversimplifying what is potentially a more complex chain of failures. 

“There was a lot of anguish and a lot of anxiety, and concern in his voice,” said John Gradek, an aviation management expert and faculty lecturer at McGill University in Montreal.

Former FAA air traffic control specialist Mike McCormick calls it “probably the most significant and worst thing that can happen to a controller.”

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have already signalled the crash cannot be pinned on a single mistake and that early findings point to a breakdown across multiple safety systems.

Thunderstorms earlier in the day created a backlog of flights during a midnight air control shift with typically lighter staffing. But zoom out even further and concerns about air traffic control staffing go back decades, as do worries over ground incursions at airports, as overall air traffic only continues to grow.

“It’s easy to blame the individual, but we know that after studying so many incidents and accidents … the origins can date back sometimes months and years earlier,” said Marc-Antoine Plourde, a Montreal-based airline pilot who for decades held seminars aimed at helping people overcome their fear of flying.

‘I can totally see myself doing that’

At the time of the collision, two controllers were working in the tower cab, standard for an overnight shift, but one that requires them to juggle multiple roles simultaneously.

Homendy acknowledged those conditions have been a concern within the system for years.

“This is a heavy workload environment,” Homendy said. “I would caution pointing fingers.”

For some in the industry, the controller’s statement was both alarming and relatable.

“I can totally see myself doing that,” said Jeff Nielsen, who hosts a podcast called Airline Pilot Guy and was a pilot for Delta Airlines for 35 years. “Feeling so responsible for what had happened and just needing to express it.”

Nielsen added that most professionals would instinctively avoid making such a statement because of how public aviation airwaves have become. 

“Most would would never even consider uttering anything that could sound like accepting responsibility or accepting blame,” he said.

Echoes of 1968 Asoh defence

In 2021, Nielsen dedicated an episode of his podcast to a 1968 aviation incident in which a Japan Airlines pilot, captain Kohei Asoh, landed a DC-8 in San Francisco Bay (instead of on the runway) and reportedly told his co-pilot, “As you Americans say, I f–ked up.”

Despite the blunt admission, Asoh was not found criminally liable. Investigators ultimately accepted that a combination of factors — including confusion, misjudgment and systemic issues — contributed to the incident.

The case has since become shorthand in aviation law for the idea that an admission of fault, on its own, does not determine liability. 

But several experts say there are huge differences between the circumstances that led to the three words uttered by Asoh in 1968 and those heard on the air traffic control airwaves on Sunday. 

“In the Japan Airlines incident, you have a pilot that made a mistake. He wasn’t directed by someone else to do something,” Hayden Hamilton, a pilot and the managing editor of the American Aviation Historical Society, told CBC News in an email. 

“In the LaGuardia accident, I believe you are going to find a number of factors and failures that led up to the accident, as tragic as it is for the poor pilots.”

‘It’s just human nature’

John Cox, a former NTSB investigator and aviation safety consultant, agrees. 

“It’s just human nature,” Cox said. “In some cases of duress, people say things and sometimes they may not even be right.”

Investigators are examining specific technical and procedural factors, including reports that ground vehicles involved may not have been equipped with transponders, and the complexities of radio communication in high-pressure moments.

Hamilton wonders why the fire truck entered an active runway without seeing that a plane was about to land and why ground collision alert systems failed. 

For Gradek, the incident represents a worst-case scenario and will no doubt be taught as a lesson in how high the stakes are.