Jeff Wise – science journalism

Can Nathan Fielder Save You From Dying in a Plane Crash?

As an aviation journalist, I was skeptical of The Rehearsal. Then I talked to experts.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on May 19, 2025.

The early moments of the season-two premiere of The Rehearsal are not the stuff of conventional comedy. The episode, titled “Gotta Have Fun,”opens on a captain and first officer in the cockpit of a commercial jet as they prepare to land at a socked-in airport. The mood is tense. An instrument is malfunctioning. Terse words are exchanged. Alarms go off. A mechanical voice calls out: “Too low! Terrain!” Farm fields appear out of the fog. Noise and tumult. Flames leap and roar. The men lie slumped in the cockpit, dead.

Well, not really dead, because the scene is taking place in a simulator. The pilots are actors, pretending. The camera pans to Nathan Fielder, the show’s creator and star, as he glumly stands outside the cockpit in a soundstage.

Again, it’s not the stuff of conventional comedy, but Fielder is not a conventional comedian. In his breakout series Nathan for You, which ran for four seasons on Comedy Central, and season one of The Rehearsal on HBO, Fielder specialized in tackling real-world problems in the most obtuse and elaborate ways possible, with the extravagance of the solution often dwarfing the scale of the problem. In season one of The Rehearsal, he built a complete replica of Brooklyn’s Alligator Lounge, accurate down to the order of the spices in a tabletop spice rack, in order to help a trivia-night participant come clean about his educational status to a teammate. The humor, if you get it — not everyone does — springs from Fielder’s near-pathological level of commitment to increasingly absurd bits. But this time around, the stakes are not small. As a journalist who writes often about aviation safety, I’m acutely aware of just how real and widespread deadly air crashes are. What if, for once, the extravagance of Fielder’s solutions matched the scale of the problem?

You’ll Pay for the Upgrades to Trump’s Luxury 747 From Qatar

The “new” Air Force One is a grift.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on May 12, 2025.

You’d think that no one needs a new jet less than Donald Trump, who already owns his own customized Boeing 757 and, as president, has free use of a pair of heavily modified 747 jumbo jets that collectively make up Air Force One.

But both of his current rides suffer significant disadvantages that Qatar’s “flying palace” 747 would overcome. Over the weekend, ABC News and others reported the country’s royal family is set to donate a jet to the U.S. Air Force in order to be upgraded to carry the president — then transfer its ownership to Trump’s presidential library when he leaves office.

Air Force One’s main drawback for Trump is that he can’t take the planes with him after the White House. Though ownership of what I’ll call the BribeJet will technically be transferred from the Qatari government to the U.S., the point of the transaction is clearly to benefit Trump personally, as he will have exclusive use of it for the rest of his life. “I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer,” he said Monday. “I mean, I could be a stupid person say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’ But it was — I thought it was a great gesture.”

Who Attacked Flights Near the White House?

After a deadly midair collision in Washington, D.C., pilots started receiving alarms that they were next.

This article orginally appeared on May 9, 2025 in New York magazine.

On January 29, at 8:47 p.m., an American Airlines flight landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter a half-mile shy of the runway at an altitude of about 300 feet. Nineteen seconds prior to impact, the jet had received a warning about the helicopter’s presence when its Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) generated an audio alert — “TRAFFIC, TRAFFIC!” — and displayed a yellow dot on the cockpit navigation system’s screen. But further aural warnings were silenced by design once the plane descended below 900 feet, so as not to distract the pilots during landing. The dot on the navigation display remained, but the flight crew’s attention had turned to the runway coming up ahead of them. Everyone aboard both aircraft died.

The accident was the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial airliner in 16 years and the deadliest since 2001. So nerves were especially tense a month later, on the morning of March 1, when more than a dozen planes inbound for Reagan experienced similar warnings. As they were drawing near the airport, following the course of the Potomac River, TCAS audio alarms unexpectedly went off: “Traffic, traffic!” or “Descend, descend!” The pilots responded as they were trained to do, quickly putting their aircraft into a dive. But just as quickly, the flight crews realized that nothing was there. Visibility was good, and there was nothing to be seen ahead of them in the sky. The tower also saw nothing, either visually or on radar. The oncoming planes weren’t real, but some kind of electronic ghost.

Exploding Cargo. Hacked GPS Devices. Spoofed Coordinates. Inside New Security Threats in the Skies.

Some experts suspect that a series of aviation incidents traces back to Russian aggressors. The sophistication only rivals the potential for danger—and the sky’s the limit.

This article originally appeared in Vanity Fair on April 24, 2025.

First, smoke curled out from the cube of packages stacked on a pallet at a DHL logistics hub near Birmingham, England, last July. Then a lick of flame emerged from the top of the stack. Racing to prevent the fire from spreading, a forklift operator snatched up the burning pallet and dashed away with it, setting it down at a safe remove before the stack turned into a roaring bonfire.

Not long after, 600 miles to the east, inside another DHL logistics hub in Leipzig, Germany, a similar scene played out. Then, according to Polish media, a third courier-related fire started near Warsaw. Polish officials say they intercepted yet another device before it went off and arrested at least four suspects. Another suspect was arrested in Lithuania, according to The Wall Street Journal, and charged with sending four of the devices from the capital city of Vilnius.

Why a Helicopter Broke Apart Over the Hudson River

Video shows the spinning rotors separating in midair from the fuselage.

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on April 11, 2025.

The tourist helicopter that crashed into the Hudson River on Thursday afternoon appears to have fallen victim to a well-known hazard known as “mast bumping,” according to aviation experts. Eyewitness video showed the rotors and the body of the helicopter separating in midair. The phenomenon is unique to helicopters with semi-rigid rotors, like the Bell 206L4 LongRanger that fell out of the sky while flying a family of Spanish tourists. The pilot, two adult passengers and three children were all killed.

The phenomenon of mast bumping arises from the physics of the rotor blades. Each helicopter blade is like a long, thin wing that generates lift as it carves through the air. Spinning at high speed, the blades form a whirring disk. The blades are attached to a hub that in turn is connected to a mast that projects vertically upward from the transmission. To visualize the relationship of the mast and the rotor hub, says Robert Joslin, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Daytona, Florida, “Think of a drinking cup upside down on the top of a broom handle. If you just move it back and forth a little bit, it won’t touch. But if you go real hard, the rim will hit the handle.” In the case of the helicopter, the hub is a fast-spinning hunk of metal that could bend the mast or break it altogether, severing the rotor and sending it flying.

Would You Buy a Fighter Jet From Donald Trump?

How the president spoiled the F-35, America’s most popular warplane.

This article orginally ran in New York magazine on March 24, 2025.

Not so long ago, the F-35 fighter jet was the hottest ticket in the international arms market. Though it had suffered teething pains in development, going over budget by 50 percent in its first decade, Lockheed Martin’s Lightning II glowed up into a remarkably capable weapons platform. Stealthy, supersonic, and able to both dogfight and strike targets on the ground, it’s arguably the most sophisticated weapon in the U.S. arsenal and undeniably the most sought-after. As nation after nation held competitions to choose their next frontline fighter, the F-35 came in and trounced its rivals time and again. “I can’t think of a competition that it entered in Europe that it didn’t win,” says Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Anywhere Lockheed Martin pitched the F-35, it wound up getting chosen.” Today, some 18 years after its first flight, more than 1,000 F-35s are in operation in 20 countries.

But then, earlier this month, something happened. One after another, nations that had signed up for the F-35 started voicing qualms. On March 13, Portugal’s defense minister said that the country would cancel plans to buy the plane. Then Canada’s prime minister said it would reconsider its purchase. Germany, too, is said to be wavering in its commitment to the jet.

Nothing had changed about the plane’s performance. It’s just that, in the eyes of some international customers, the F-35 can’t fully be trusted anymore because of who is the commander-in-chief. Donald Trump has an affinity for authoritarianism, has exhibited poor treatment of NATO (whose Article 5 obligates collective defense), and, in particular, has threatened to annex Greenland and Canada.

Why Air Travel’s Getting Dangerous

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.

Why This Search for MH370 Could Be Different

If it’s not found, much of the story we’ve been told will turn out to be false.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on February 26, 2025.

The third search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has begun, 11 years after the plane practically vanished. On Sunday, a ship belonging to the American maritime-survey company Ocean Infinity arrived at a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean where the plane is believed to have crashed. It then deployed a trio of advanced robot subs three miles under the waves to scan the seabed using sonar waves. If successful, the effort will locate the wreckage of the aircraft together with the black boxes that will allow investigators to solve the mystery. If not, it will effectively disprove the analysis underlying the seabed search and suggest that officials bungled some fundamental assumptions.

The first underwater search for the missing plane was launched more than a decade ago, months after MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers’ screens on March 8, 2014, during a routine red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. Scientists at the satellite-communications company Inmarsat later found that the plane had sent seven automatic radio signals before vanishing for good. In analyzing the data, scientists were able to extract a route from Malaysia into the southern Indian Ocean and concluded that the plane’s wreckage must lie near the end point of this path. Australia, which was responsible for finding the plane due to the search-and-rescue zone, hired a Dutch marine-survey company, Fugro, which dispatched a trio of ships to drag underwater sensors over the seabed. At first, officials were highly confident that they would locate the plane in short order, with one boasting that they had a 97 percent chance of success. But the plane was not in the search area measuring 46,000 square miles. Fugro increased the size of the search zone, then increased it again, without success. In 2017, the search was abandoned.

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.