Jeff Wise – science journalism

How Can a Plane Suddenly Nose-Dive?

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 collision between 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.

The D.C. Plane Crash Is No Mystery

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.

American Airlines Plane Crash Ends U.S. Aviation’s Safety Streak

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.

A Private Jet Full of Vegas Revelers Never Made It Home. Would They Have Been Safer Flying Commercial?

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.

What It’s Like to Be a Waterbomber

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.

Keep Calm and Drone On

Drone swarms are coming. Don’t panic. They’re bringing that stuff you ordered.

This article first appeared in Sherwood News on January 14, 2025.

Do you have a sneaking suspicion that an unmanned vehicle is hovering over your house? The odds that you’re right are growing fast. And that drone might just be bringing you a hamburger.

In more than a dozen locations across the US, fleets of autonomous vehicles are zipping through the sky, summoned by customers seeking convenience and a touch of novelty. These battery-powered vessels are delivering food, medicine, and other small consumer goods, often within 30 minutes of an order being placed, and they do so almost noiselessly, without adding any traffic to roads or carbon emissions to the atmosphere.

Some of America’s biggest retailers are behind the surge, and the plan is to push toward ubiquity over the next 5 to 10 years. “Between Amazon, Walmart, DoorDash, and Uber Eats, you’re going to see 100,000 or 200,000 autonomous robots operating in the lower part of the airspace,” Andreas Raptopoulos, CEO of the drone-delivery startup Matternet, said. “It will be a profound transformation of how things work.”

Delivery drones have been simmering on the back burner for years now. They broke into public consciousness back in 2013 when Jeff Bezos revealed on “60 Minutes” that AmazonAMZN $218.12 (-0.31%) was experimenting with bringing small packages to customers using uncrewed aircraft.

Then things went quiet. Apart from a few test projects here and there, neither Amazon nor anyone else seemed to be making much progress. The problems were many. For one thing, drones were noisy, slow, and had limited range. For another, communities balked at the prospect of being swarmed by what sounded like giant mosquitos.

Most of all, what was holding drone delivery back was regulation. The Federal Aviation Administration is responsible for every form of civilian aircraft that flies in the US airspace, and while it’s an enthusiastic supporter of using that airspace profitably, it’s also extremely serious about protecting the public from danger.

As Amazon and others developed their vehicles, the FAA maintained strict rules over their operation. In particular, it mandated that each vehicle had to be controlled by a single dedicated operator who maintained a line of sight on the craft at all times.

The New Threat to Los Angeles Firefighters: Drones

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.

How Do You Stop a Hurricane Made of Fire?

California fights wildfires like wars, but this one may be unwinnable.

This article originally ran on January 9, 2025 in New York magazine.

Walls of flames pushed by hurricane-force winds are devouring the Los Angeles basin, leveling whole neighborhoods and overwhelming firefighters. The water streaming from fire hydrants slows to a trickle. Ash rains down over the tens of thousands fleeing their homes, masked against the choking smoke. For Angelenos watching their city burn, there is no prior experience that can help them grasp the scale of what is happening. As a friend texted me from Hollywood, “This may be the biggest wildfire disaster in world history.”

The scale of the destruction is all the more dismaying given how assiduously California has prepared itself to combat wildfires. The state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as CAL FIRE, spends $4 billion a year on prevention and mitigation. Over the last decade that money has allowed it to assemble an army-like force of unprecedented sophistication and scale, with a staff of 12,000 and an aerial firefighting fleet larger than most countries’ air forces.

Yet in the face of some of the worst fire conditions in over a decade, it hasn’t been enough. Though some 9,000 firefighters were on hand to battle this week’s blazes, they were overwhelmed by the multiple wildfires that moved at hundreds of yards per minute. “We don’t have enough fire personnel in L.A. County between all the departments to handle this,” L.A. County fire chief Anthony Marrone told the L.A. Times on Wednesday.

The problem wasn’t only a shortage of manpower. Even the most formidable human efforts are useless when bone-dry undergrowth is whipped by the strongest winds the area has experienced in years, with gusts up to 100 mph. “When that wind is howling like that, nothing’s going to stop that fire,” says Wayne Coulson, CEO of the aerial firefighting company Coulson Aviation that’s battling the fires. “You just need to get out of the way.”

The winds slackened Wednesday night and on Thursday morning, helping firefighters gain the upper hand against some of the infernos. The city’s fire chief announced on Thursday that the Woodley fire in the San Fernando Valley had been brought under control and that firefighters had made gains against the Sunset fire threatening Hollywood. But other fires still burned out of control and further danger loomed. According to the National Weather Service, humidity remains dangerously low and gusty winds of up to 70 mph are expected between Thursday night and Friday evening. By Thursday morning, five major fires were still burning and tens of thousandsof people were under evacuation orders. Warned the NWS: “Any new wildfires that develop will likely spread rapidly.”

OpenAI is Intel

This article originally ran in Sherwood News on December 26, 2024.

In 1959, physicist Robert Noyce and his colleagues at the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation created a nifty little piece of technology: a wafer of silicon with an entire electronic circuit printed on it. As a technical breakthrough, it was an impressively clever feat, but what made Noyce’s achievement historically important was the cascade of innovations that followed. By making it possible to progressively shrink computing power into smaller and cheaper packages, the integrated circuit gave rise to wave after wave of transformative products, from the pocket calculator to the personal computer, the internet, and mobile computing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Noyce’s invention engendered the entire digital world as we know it today.

Noyce and some of his collaborators left Fairchild to form their own company, IntelINTC $19.92 (-2.41%), in 1968. Like OpenAI today, Intel had a head start on a new field of almost unlimited promise, and it used its advantage to great effect. In 1971 the company invented the microprocessor chip, a development that would later enable personal computers to bring the information age into homes of retail consumers. In 1997, Time magazine named Intel CEO Andrew Grove its Man of the Year. By 2000, the company had a market cap of $250 billion and ranked as the sixth-most-valuable business in the world.

That, however, proved to be the company’s high-water mark. In the years that followed, the company learned that being present at the birth of a technology and riding it to great heights doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll be able to sniff out market trends and outcompete newcomers indefinitely. In 1999, NvidiaNVDA $138.46 (0.28%), a much smaller rival, began shipping its first graphics processing unit, or GPU. In the decade to come, these chips would prove essential to the growth of PC gaming and multimedia applications, and then proved equally vital to both cryptocurrency mining and the large language models that power OpenAI. This time it was Nvidia, not Intel, whose chips were powering the revolution, and the changing of the guard was reflected in the company’s share prices. Ten years ago, Intel’s market cap was 15x bigger than Nvidia’s; today Nvidia’s is 30x bigger.

Investor Warren Buffett famously once said that he likes to invest in companies whose business has an “economic moat” around it — some factor, whether brand strength, network effects, patents, or economies of scale, that prevents rivals from swooping in and poaching its business. A head start in a technology can function as a moat for a while. But success inevitably draws rivals, and sooner or later some of them will catch up, or the demands of the market will change and favor a different technology. For now, OpenAI has a first-mover advantage in machine learning, and it has every reason to be optimistic about its fortunes in the years ahead. But if history is any guide, its halcyon days will eventually go the way of all flesh.

5 Unanswered Questions About the South Korea Plane Crash

This article originally ran in New York magazine on December 30, 2024.

The Jeju Air 737 crash in South Korea on Sunday that killed all but two of the people onboard was in many respects as baffling as it was tragic. Given the scant information currently available, it’s hard even to piece together a coherent picture of what happened. “There’s a lot more questions than there are answers,” says Jim Brauchle, an aviation attorney who flew transport planes in the U.S. Air Force and now investigates air crashes as part of his law practice.

What we do know is that the plane was inbound from Bangkok, Thailand, to Muan, South Korea, with 175 passengers and six crew members when it apparently flew into a flock of birds and sucked at least one into an engine as it came in to land. Video taken from the ground appears to show a puff of smoke coming from the plane’s right engine, signaling a compressor stall that would have caused the engine to lose some if not all of its thrust.

The flight crew declared an emergency and aborted the landing. Around this time, the plane stopped transmitting its speed and location data via an automatic system called ADS-B, which lets the plane be tracked on websites like FlightRadar24. At the moment of its final transmission, the plane was a mile and half from the approach end of the runway and about 500 feet above the surface.