A subset of air traffic controllers, ground control is in charge of moving aircraft on the active taxiways of the airport. These workers occasionally run into problems with aircrafts, routing logistics or even technology.
Ground control at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) in California uses radios that work like walkie-talkies, which can cause problems. If someone presses the "talk" button without realizing it, no one else can communicate with a particular pilot to guide her in the aircraft.
Ground control sometimes deal with pilots who are unfamiliar with a particular airport's layout. In what's considered a "worst-case scenario" by an LAX controller, a pilot can taxi onto a runway that is being used to take off by another aircraft because the pilot did not understand the controller.
At international airports, ground control often has to communicate with pilots flying in from foreign countries. Language barriers can complicate the pilot understanding ground control's instructions on how to safely take off or land.
Ground control runs into problems when the computers that store flight plans fail; not all airports have backups. When this happens, aircrafts cannot take off or land, and ground control has to wait for a technician to fix the computers.
Even the largest airports only have so many runways and gates, and there is not a lot of funding to build additional facilities. Ground control runs into delays when there are more airplanes that want to take off, land or taxi to a gate than there are facilities available.
