LGA

I haven't really read anything on the LGA crash, beyond the headlines, but it sounds like a controller error. It's crazy easy for that to happen, at the moment of things like a truck crossing a runway, the whole house of cards is generally dependent on a human remembering where everyone is and what they're doing. Not that hard, but easy to get distracted for a moment and forget that an Air Canada jet just touched down on the runway that you just cleared a truck across.

I say "generally dependent" because after a somewhat similar crash in LAX a few years back, there was talk of installing sensors to back up the controller. I don't know how common that is, though, or, if they work equally well for trucks as they do for airplanes.

Also, airports in general have a radar that covers the ground area called ASDE (Airport Surface Detection Equipment) that I would think would have shown both the truck and the plane converging. I think that is really only intended for use in fog, though, and there are probably too many things moving around in too small a space for it to be generally useful. I'm not sure about that, though.

I don't think we should be TOO sympathetic to the controller, although his life is probably over both career and mental health wise. The media and union will bring out the usual tropes about being overworked, but the story I read said there were two (of four) controllers "on a break" when this accident happened. My experience is that controllers work very hard to maximize their break time. And 99.999% of the time, everything works out.