“I would caution against pointing fingers at controllers and saying distraction was involved.”
Jennifer Homendy, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, speaking at a press conference about the deadly crash at LaGuardia Airport that killed two pilots on Sunday night. An Air Canada jet landing at the airport collided with a fire truck that was responding to a separate incident. The two air traffic controllers in the tower at the time of the incident were doing the jobs of four people — a common practice on night shifts around the country, but one the NTSB has warned against many times, Homendy said. Homendy said it was too early to tell whether distraction played a role in the crash. [New York Times]