Andrew Tangel
speaker
65 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Andrew Tangel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And this big high-stakes move by the FAA raises the question of whether or not the cure, at least for now, is worse than the disease.
The controllers have to make sure that they're lining up all the airplanes safely. They tell them where to go, where to turn, what altitude, what speed to go at, and they've got to juggle all this and sort of act like a conductor at an orchestra.
It's this big building tucked in the suburbs of New York City out on Long Island in the town of Westbury. And it's called the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control, or in air traffic control jargon, it's a TRACON.
It's kind of the biggest, baddest TRACON in the whole country.
You've got to be spot on. It's a little bit of an adrenaline rush. It can be different every day. Oh, we're busy? All right, let's go. Let's move. Historically, it is known for having its own culture. People who've worked there historically have described it as a bit of a sort of a rough-and-tumble place where they sort of do things their own way.
Some might say out of necessity because it's so difficult with all the airports stacked on top of each other.
We've heard it described as sort of a place where you get told to suck it up and, you know, deal with. I think it's maybe symbolized in, like, the local New York TRACON graphic on social media with, like, the skeleton, you know, the skull with the headset.
Yeah, it's a tough place to work and a tough place to thrive. Kind of like New York, right?
There's the question about whether or not the culture at the New York TRACON led to people not being successful in training, either because they couldn't cut it, they didn't like the environment, they didn't like Long Island. For whatever reason, new recruits from the academy were leaving at very high numbers.
They went through with it basically on the theory that they will have a better job of recruiting new staff and getting them trained successfully in Philadelphia.
They opposed it. They pushed back. They raised safety concerns.
The local union leader saw this move of the Newark airspace down to Philadelphia as a way to undermine the union's control of the New York TRACON.
So the controller's telling the pilots where to point the nose and how to get safely on the ground. He's got what they call targets on the screen, when all of a sudden... Black.
He goes to the backup. It's also black. Wow. For a controller, it's like having a bag over your head when you're going down the highway.
Yeah, in the end, the radar came back, the planes landed safely, but this is a heart-stopping moment.
a contractor essentially pulled the wrong circuit and cut off the feed that was coming from Long Island.
The controller's radios failed. They couldn't communicate easily with other facilities. Yeah, we have no answer on approach, so I don't know. One FedEx plane coming in for a landing at Newark missed its final approach because the controllers couldn't talk to them and flew potentially into oncoming traffic departing from LaGuardia.
Now, the FAA has been dealing with this since then, but you can see how that episode could be really scary for controllers.
One controller told me when they were on Long Island, we used to get our ass kicked once a week. Now we get our ass kicked every day.
Thanks for watching. And that staffing shortage was made worse recently because some of those controllers went on so-called trauma leave, which they're allowed to take after scary experiences like having those radio failures earlier in November.
Showing 41–60 of 65 · page 3 of 4
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