Jeff Wise

The Trump administration has been aggressively pursuing policies that will make travelers’ odds inevitably worse.

This article originally ran on Slate on March 3, 2025.

Nervous air travelers might be forgiven for feeling a little more anxious than usual since the start of the Trump administration. Only nine days in, a horrific midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter ended a 16-year streak without a fatal U.S. airline crash. Then, two days later, a medevac jet nosedived into a busy Philadelphia street, killing all six aboard and one person on the ground. Then, a week later, a private jet slammed into a larger parked jet while landing in Arizona, killing the first plane’s pilot. And a week after that a Delta flight flipped upside down while landing in Toronto.

Was the Trump administration directly responsible for the surge in air disasters? The timing seems uncanny, but no. Whatever his flaws, Trump plainly does not deserve blame for this particular mess, which stems from a combination of bad luck and institutional failings that have been accumulating for years.

What is also plain, however, is that since it has come to power, the Trump administration has been aggressively pursuing policies that will make travelers’ odds inevitably worse. So is commercial aviation still remarkably safe? Yes. Is it about to get dramatically less safe? Also yes.

Here are some of the problems that already exist, and why they’ll get worse.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on February 1, 2025.

On Friday night, northeast Philadelphia was rocked by the high-speed impact of a medevac jet that nose-dived into a busy avenue shortly after takeoff from North Philadelphia Airport. Having climbed to an altitude of 1,650 feet, the plane plummeted nearly vertically at more than 200 mph. Heavily loaded with fuel for a planned 1,000-mile flight to Springfield, Missouri, the plane exploded with the power of a cruise missile, incinerating cars and rattling neighborhood windows as it sent a fireball into the night sky. All six people aboard the plane were killed, as was at least one person on the ground, and at least 19 others were injured. It was the second horrific plane crash in the U.S. in as many days, following the collisionbetween an American Airlines passenger jet and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night.

At time of writing, details of the Philadelphia accident are scarce. The plane was a Mexican-registered Learjet 55, a plane last produced in the 1980s. It was operated by a company called Jet Rescue Air Ambulance and was reportedly returning a young patient and her mother to Mexico after the child received treatment for a life-threatening condition at Shriners Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. In addition to the pilot and co-pilot, two medical personnel were also aboard the plane. In recent days, the plane hadtraveled frequently between Haiti, Mexico, and the United States. The company had suffered an earlier fatal crash in Morelos, Mexico, in 2023.

In the weeks ahead, accident investigators from the National Transport Safety Board will interview witnesses, collect and examine the wreckage, study maintenance records, and, if it is available, review data from the plane’s flight data recorder to understand what caused the crash and issue safety recommendations to prevent similar tragedies from recurring. As they assemble the evidence, investigators will be thinking about similar accidents that have happened in the past, looking for patterns to guide them in their search for the causal factors.

Here is a far-from-exhaustive list of some possibly relevant antecedents to Friday’s crash regarding why aircraft can nose-dive.

1. Pilot Disorientation

At the time of the crash, the weather in Philadelphia was overcast, with a cloud ceiling of 400 feet. That means that mere seconds after takeoff, the pilot flying the plane lost all visual reference to the ground, seeing out the window only shades of gray and black. Under so-called “instrument conditions,” the human brain is easily tricked into perceiving turns or acceleration as vertical motion and can easily become badly disoriented.

A lot is unknown, but one basic fact is not: The helicopter pilot was at fault.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on January 31, 2025.

When air accidents happen, it’s important not to rush to judgment. Accurately determining the cause requires time and meticulous attention to detail, and though the process is laborious, it’s worth it because understanding what went wrong is the only way to prevent it from happening again.

That being said, in the wake of a crash, there are certain facts that quickly become evident, and there’s no benefit to imagining ambiguity where none exists.

In the case of the tragic midair collision that took place in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, there really is no great mystery as to which aircraft was at fault. It was quite clearly the Army Black Hawk helicopter that was not where it was supposed to be. While it may be the case that the tower was not properly staffed or that the airport’s resources are chronically overtaxed, neither of these things played a role in the crash that took the lives of 67 passengers and crew.

Just at the same time Trump slashes the federal government.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on January 30, 2025.

While landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday shortly before 9 p.m., American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter and crashed into the icy Potomac River. The jet carried 64 passengers and crew, while the helicopter carried three soldiers. Authorities currently believe there were no survivors. The collision marks the first fatal crash of a U.S. carrier since 2009, when a Colgan Air regional jet crashed while landing in Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 aboard.

The American Airlines jet had departed from Wichita, Kansas, and was on a normal approach to Reagan’s runway 33, flying at an altitude of approximately 300 feet over the Potomac when it struck the helicopter, which was flying from north to south over the river. Shortly before the collision, air-traffic control asked the helicopter’s pilot if he had the airliner in sight, according to audio of the exchange posted to LiveATC.net. During a press conference on Thursday morning, officials said that they did not know why the helicopter had flown into the path of the jet, which was carrying American and Russian figure skaters.

Appearing at a press conference Thursday morning, the newly confirmed secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, insisted that both aircraft had been following standard routes. “This was not unusual,” Duffy said. “Everything was standard in the lead-up to the crash.”

However, route maps of the area published by the FAA for use by helicopter pilots show that helicopters are supposed to remain below 200 feet and hug the eastern shore of the Potomac. The last data point reported by the plane’s automatic position-reporting system showed it at an altitude of 275 feet and a quarter-mile from the eastern bank, suggesting that it was the Black Hawk that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Fancy fliers are creating a huge boom in private-jet travel, no longer the exclusive province of Fortune 500 companies, Donald Trump, or Taylor Swift. Yet for all the allure of flying private, it’s a rather dangerous luxury.

This article originally ran in Vanity Fair on January 29, 2025.

THEY CALLED HER Gypset. The name, a combination of gypsy and jet set, wasn’t one she’d come up with herself; she’d gotten it from the writer Julia Chaplin, who coined the term in her 2009 book, Gypset Style, to evoke the vibe of bright young things who waft from Sayulita to Tangier to Topanga Canyon, crafting eclectic necklaces and draping yurts with Hermès cashmere. Athletic and glamorously bohemian, with glacial blue eyes and a silver ring in her nose, Gypset embodied her nickname’s ideal, always flying off to go skiing or hang out backstage at a rock show.

Her given name was Lindsey Gleiche. She was 31 and lived in Huntington Beach, California, a short walk to the Pacific surf. Being a gypset is an occupation best suited for the independently wealthy, and Gleiche wasn’t that; she had a normal job, designing websites for Dollar General. But she was beautiful, friendly, and free-spirited.

In mid-2022, she met a man five years her junior, Riese Lenders, on a ski trip to Mammoth. Lenders was a pilot who was building his flight experience in Cessnas, turboprops, and small jets. He took her on jaunts to Las Vegas to see shows; to Arizona for her birthday; to the Bay Area for more music.

Diving into burning canyons with Tanker 47

This story originally ran on January 16, 2025, in New York magazine.

Tanker 47 rears up as helicopter pilot Darren Davies settles it to hover over the Encino Reservoir, a half-mile-wide artificial lake perched on the shoulder of a hill overlooking the San Fernando Valley. He holds steady a dozen feet over the water as the flight mechanic in back, John Trivellin, lowers a 23-foot-long retractable snorkel into the reservoir.

“Tanker 47, we’re in the dip,” co-pilot Pablo Montero calls over the radio.

It’s 9.30 p.m. on Saturday, January 11, and the crew is on its third night working the Palisades fire, a Godzilla of a blaze that has already scorched more than 20,000 acres, killed five people, and annihilated more than 5,000 homes and other structures. The fire is less than 15 percent contained.

Davies’s infrared goggles turn the night into day, rendering the sprawling lights of the Valley below like a galaxy. In front sits a yellow rubber duck, a sort of mascot, jiggling atop the control panel from the vibrations of two massive sets of triple-rotor blades whirling overhead, each weighing 360 pounds. Radio frequencies for different fires are scrawled in black Sharpie on the inside of the windscreen in front of Montero, who handles most communications.

The Chinook is a beast, a 99-foot-long, 25-ton machine originally designed for humping troops and weapons around the battlefield, now repurposed for a different kind of war. It’s more than twice as big as the Black Hawk, its most famous cousin, and twice as long as a semi trailer when counting its 60-foot rotors. Inside Tanker 47’s cargo bay sits a 3,000-gallon tank, roughly equivalent to six hot tubs. While it’s not a vast amount in absolute terms, a helicopter can drop the water precisely, and all at once, which can halt the advance of even a large fire.

Within seconds, Davies can feel the aircraft grow heavier as the snorkel drinks from the reservoir and he throttles up the twin 5,000-horsepower turbine engines to compensate. In less than two minutes, the helicopter has taken on ten tons of water.

Aerial gawkers are getting in the way.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on January 10, 2025.

Aerial firefighting is already one of the most dangerous kinds of aviation there is. Pilots must maneuver heavy, sluggish planes over rough terrain at low altitude, often amid severe turbulence and poor visibility. Now aerial firefighters battling the Los Angeles wildfires are facing an additional danger: illegal drones. On Thursday a “Super Scooper” plane fighting the Palisade fire collided with a drone that tore a hole in its wing, forcing it to land and taking a powerful weapon out of the fight when it was urgently needed.

In the aftermath the FAA promised severe punishment for anyone caught flying drones in a way that interferes with firefighting, with penalties of up to 12 months in prison and $75,000 in fines. But the uncomfortable reality is that there is little that authorities can do to prevent illegal drone flights, as this incident and the recent New Jersey drone swarm panic both demonstrate.

Thursday’s accident occurred as firefighters struggled to contain a blaze that had consumed more than 17,000 acres, though it was spreading less aggressively thanks to a temporary lull in the winds. The aircraft, a twin-engine CL-415, is a Canadian-built amphibious aircraft designed specifically for aerial firefighting. It can skim along the surface of a lake or ocean and scoop up 1,600 gallons of water at a time, allowing it to carry out many sorties in a short interval since it doesn’t have to return to an airport to refill. A picture posted online by the L.A. County Fire Department showed a fist-size hole in the leading edge of the plane’s left wing. According to reporting by the WarZone, the incident led to the temporary grounding of all aircraft tasked to the Palisades fire.