Category: Aviation

The biggest threat to air-passenger safety right now may be our own government.

This article originally ran on August 7, 2026 in New York magazine.

In the midafternoon of Tuesday, August 4, an air-traffic controller in the tower of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport was surprised to find that he had an unexpected intruder into his airspace: the president of the United States. At 2:33 p.m., the helicopter on which he was riding, Marine One, and a lookalike Sikorsky VH-92A Patriot helicopter that serves as a decoy, were suddenly in his airspace, moving from the grassy Ellipse near the White House southward toward the Potomac River.

“National Tower, Marine One, proceeding as briefed,” came the radio call.

The reason this came as a shock is that, by pre-agreed rules, the president’s helicopter was supposed to give the tower three minutes’ warning before it takes off. That’s no mere formality; D.C. is incredibly busy airspace, with commercial jets coming into land on a main runway that’s just three miles south of the White House. Numerous VIP transport, security patrol, and other helicopter flights are constantly threading through an airspace that’s been likened to a spiderweb. Keeping everyone moving without running into each other is a tall order, and the price of failure is tremendous — as attested to by last January’s midair collision between an Army helicopter and a passenger jet that left 67 dead. The three minutes’ notice would have given the tower a chance to halt all other traffic and give the presidential flight clear airspace. But, since no notification had been received, Marine One was now just chugging along right through the middle of everything.

Founders’ newest status symbol? Getting a pilot’s license to fly their own plane

This article orginally ran on August 6, 2026 in Inc. magazine.

After graduating from high school in 2000, David Spector spent the summer working construction for his uncle in Maryland. He spent his earnings on a secret vice: flying lessons in a two-seat Cessna 152. But the dream didn’t last. “My parents caught me lying about where I’d go after work,” he recalls.

Spector went on to earn degrees from Tulane and then Sloan, after which he made partner at Sequoia Capital. He quit Sequoia, and he and his wife launched the intimate apparel brand Thirdlove, which has generated an estimated $1 billion in revenue since its inception. He then pivoted to launch Nanotrace, an oncology biotech startup.

With money in his pocket, Spector returned to his forbidden love, enrolling in flight school, earning his private pilot’s license, and, three years ago, buying a single-engine Cirrus SR22T propeller plane that he flies for fun and business. As a founder who’s passionate about aviation, he’s in good company. “Technology and entrepreneurship go hand in hand with flying,” he says.

Once a month or so, Spector meets with a couple dozen Silicon Valley owner-pilots in a gathering called Founders Who Fly, which is sometimes held at a hangar at San Carlos Airport, on the San Francisco Bay. The hangar belongs to Christian Bailey, a serial entrepreneur who learned to fly helicopters while a university student and now pilots prop planes and jets. At an event there this spring, the guests lounged on sofas that had been pulled out onto the cement floor of the hangar, chose between a Southern Rhône and a white Burgundy, and discussed seaplanes, helicopters, and safety while gazing upon a pair of shiny new bush planes that belonged to one of the attendees.

Why would a perfectly good plane go rogue? The answer grounded 6,000 aircraft.

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on August 3, 2026.

To celebrate their second anniversary together, 22-year-old Terrica Turner and her boyfriend, Tyrese Banks, took a trip to Cancún. They flew from Newark and spent five days at a resort, relaxing and swimming in the pool. On the morning of Thursday, October 30, 2025, they boarded their flight home, JetBlue 1230, taking their seats at the back of the aircraft, two rows forward of the rear galley. After the Airbus 320 took off, Banks was nervous. This was the second leg of his first trip by air, and the normal shakes and shudders of the aircraft hitting light turbulence were alarming to him. Terrica told him that she’d experienced worse turbulence before, everything would be fine, and that he should trust his seat belt to do its job. He leaned against the window and shut his eyes.

Midway through the flight, about two hours after takeoff, as the plane approached the western coast of Florida, a flight attendant with a service cart pulled up to the couple’s row and asked Turner what kind of snack she wanted. Banks was about to fall asleep. Turner was about to ask for Goldfish when the jet went into free fall. “There was a whooshing sound,” Turner says. “The plane just started falling.” The cart and the flight attendant lurched violently upward, the heavy cart pinning the woman against the ceiling.

Though Turner and Banks were wearing seat belts, they were only loosely fastened, and they also lurched upward, their heads smacking the panel above their seats. All around them, people and objects were flying through the air, hitting the roof inside the plane. Suspended above her seat, head jammed against the hard plastic amid the fan ducts and reading lights, Turner screamed and sobbed. “No, no, no, no, no!” she remembers saying. “What the fuck!”

Drone warfare is making the skies more dangerous, even for airplanes far from the battlefield.

This article originally appeared in Wired magazine on July 30, 2026.

THIS PAST MAY, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn’t have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69 degrees; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most.

But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots—and anyone else within hundreds of miles—unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.

The accident marked the first time that GPS jamming had contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States. But it was just one of a string of recent disruptionsacross the world. The skies are more contested than ever, whether it’s civilian drones wandering out of the approved zone or US agencies getting their signals crossed, as happened earlier this year when New Mexico and Texas scared the public by temporarily closing their airspace. (It turned out that US Customs and Border Patrol were using anti-drone lasers in that area.) The GPS jamming exercise that led to this latest crash is not a singular event. In the past year, the US military appeared to have sent out notices for at least 10 such exercises. “As drone warfare and electronic warfare expand, airlines are increasingly encountering navigation disruptions hundreds of miles beyond the actual conflict zone,” says Eliran Almog, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Cyviation.

It’s worth taking a closer look at what happened last May. While the Ruidoso crash was the first fatal accident in the US known to be linked to electronic warfare, there’s no reason to think it will be the last.

Each year, amateur and stunt pilots alike descend on an otherwise quiet Midwestern tarmac for a high-flying extravaganza that appears to throw caution to the wind—except for a brilliant team of air-traffic controllers stepping into the chaos.

This article originally appeared in National Geographic on July 20, 2026.

For four and a half years, Paul Roberts, a 58-year-old nurse practitioner from Monroe, Louisiana, tinkered away in his garage, building a tiny, four-seat airplane from scratch. Then, one sunny day last July, he strapped in, took off, and flew 800 miles north, paralleling the course of the Mississippi River.

As Roberts soared over central Wisconsin, he spotted what he was looking for: a swarm of small aircraft, arriving from every direction, forming a 30-mile-long conga line in the sky that stretched eastward toward the city of Oshkosh. Roberts found a place and joined in.

He was taking part in the world’s greatest annual migration of aircraft, in which roughly 10,000 planes converge on Oshkosh, Wisconsin’s Wittman Regional Airport each July for the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture show—commonly known as Oshkosh. The week-long event transforms an open Midwestern field into a pop-up city that sprawls across hundreds of acres and draws half a million visitors who’ve come to collectively bask in the roar of engines, the aroma of exhaust, and the spectacle of flying machines swooping across the summer sky.

Over the span of a few days, Wittman becomes the busiest airport in the world, and an elite squad of air traffic controllers must carefully coordinate arrivals, departures, and a series of high-octane aerial performances by skilled display pilots. It is the most precisely choreographed ballet of steel, aluminum, and jet fuel on earth. The action ramps up as the week progresses, and the stakes are tremendous. With so many jets in the sky and so many people on the ground, one wrong move could end in catastrophe.

This story appeared in New York magazine’s Vulture section on March 30, 2026.

The FX miniseries Love Story, about the tempestuous relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, is bracketed by the story of their final, fatal flight to Martha’s Vineyard in 1999. The first episode begins with them boarding the plane and taking off on a summer afternoon; the final episode revolves around the events of that flight and its impact on their loved ones and the public. It’s a crucial episode, both in their real lives and in the plot of the show. But is it accurate? Well …

The show does get the rough outline of the incident right. John did indeed attempt to fly his personal Piper Saratoga from an airport in Caldwell, New Jersey, to Martha’s Vineyard and then to Hyannis, Massachusetts. Onboard with him were Carolyn and her sister Lauren. They took off at 8:40 p.m. on July 16 and headed east, following the Connecticut coast. Then, over the ocean west of Martha’s Vineyard, John became spatially disoriented and lost control. After the plane failed to arrive, search parties set out to look for them. The wreckage and the three bodies were found four days later.

While the overall arc of the narrative matches the details laid out in the official crash investigation carried out by the National Transportation Safety Board, much of what’s shown onscreen is creative license, since there was no cockpit voice recording of what happened during the flight. Other details are simply inaccurate. Here are the significant errors.

This article orginally appeared in New York magazine on March 23, 2026.

Shortly before midnight on Sunday, Air Canada Express Flight 8646, a Canadair CRJ-900 operated by Jazz Aviation LP, collided with a firetruck after landing at New York’s La Guardia Airport.

Publicly available audio of air-traffic-control radio communications with planes and ground equipment, as well as visual playback of automatically reported aircraft positions and speed, make it possible to determine the exact sequence of events that led to the crash.

10:23 p.m.: The Air Canada Express flight, bearing the flight number AC8646 and the air-traffic call sign “Jazz 646,” takes off from Montreal carrying 72 passengers and four crew members.

10:40 p.m.: United Airlines 2384, a 737 MAX headed for Chicago, is taking off from La Guardia Runway 13 when the flight crew decides to abort the takeoff due to a warning light. It taxis back to the end of the runway and tries again 18 minutes later, then aborts the takeoff a second time at 11:19. The plane, which at this point is on the eastern side of the airport, then taxis a short distance away from the runway and reports that an odor in the cabinhas caused flight attendants to feel ill. A fire truck is dispatched from the airport fire station, located on the western side of the airport.

11:33 p.m.: The Air Canada flight, descending through 3,000 feet over Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, turns left and lines up to land on Runway 04 at La Guardia. A light rain is falling, and a light wind is blowing from the northeast.