You can't think of any scenario having one controller makes sense?
I don't think people saying this stuff quite understand how busy LGA is even at night. I'd even go as far as to say that three minimum on duty with two in the tower at all times (for a ground/air split), would be the bare minimum for any hour or situation at LGA.
La Guardia appears to handle 400 flights a day, 22 an hour. I see 6 moving planes right now (https://www.flightradar24.com/airport/lga); hopefully they have more than one person on?
At one of the nation's busiest airports? Where there are two intersecting runways, both potentially with departing and arriving aircraft? Nope.
But, sure, a single-runway regional airport can probably get by with a single controller.
Here it's being done at SFO or so it seems: https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?FileExtension=...
While searching I did find this other document where a GC (LC appears to be Local Control for local air traffic and GC is ground control) controller complains about combining due to short-staffing https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=19837915&Fi...
Well, it'll be an interesting report from the NTSB at least.
Looking at the normal schedules - if all is on schedule there'd be no departures in the 23:00 hour but you'd still have the arrivals side running pretty heavily. However, once you factor in things not being on schedule, as they evidently were not on that night, you get:
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The 15min before the accident had 14 flight operations (per Juan Browne/blancolirio going through the ADSB playback). And that's in marginal weather and at night, which makes things more complicated.
That is 75% of the official maximum capacity of the airport - during the main part of the day where there's government-imposed caps on flights, it's capped at 74 operations per hour or about 18.5 per 15min.
As such, it seems apparent that you would need just as much staffing (or at least 75% as much) at that time to safely handle the traffic volume that was occurring that night as you did in the main part of the day.
Unless the normal staffing here was just 2 people, it seems clear that 1 is inadequate.
What we are seeing here is the normalization of deviance.
One last meta point. We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and the highest air travel prices (some part is a function of longer distances I know). We should expect that we have ample coverage, if not over-coverage, at all times for one of our major metropolitan airports. Pay them.
ATC should never work alone at any of the "Core 30" airports. https://www.aspm.faa.gov/aspmhelp/index/Core_30.html
However despite the downvotes I still haven't seen evidence that they were running understaffed at that moment.
What I do know is that the developing emergency on the tarmac due to an apparently hazardous smell in another plane is likely the cause of the confusion that led to this incident. That's a trigger that could have been exacerbated by fatigue but we don't have any evidence of that yet.
I think the disagreement you see is based on the definition of what "understaffed" means. Having one ATC to do ground and air control simultaneously seems like an under-staffing situation to begin with, regardless of whether it's a common practice.
What happens when they need the bathroom, or have some kind of medical problem? If it's really a common case for one controller to handle things, the system itself needs to be fundamentally rethought.
