The Flying Car is Finally Here. It’s Slightly Illegal

This article originally ran in New York magazine on October 3, 2024

Most mornings, when the air lies still on the ridges of the North Cascades in central Washington State, Tim Lum climbs into his personal flying car, a 14-foot-long bean-shaped craft called a BlackFly, straps himself in, and sets the machine’s four rotor blades whirring. As the 61-year-old retired smoke jumper levitates into the crepuscular sky, the landscape opens up below him, the forest stretching along the ridge and the farmland sprawling across the valley floor below. The aircraft swings forward into horizontal flight, and Lum zips off, flowing along the contours of the land, taking in the scenery. “It’s stunning, very dramatic,” he tells me later. “Cliffs and trees and valleys.”

I’ve been writing paragraphs like this for decades for magazines like Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, imagining a time in the not-so-distant future when the long-awaited promise of flying cars — more officially known as electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles, or EVTOL — is finally made a reality. This time, though, the scene is not a flight of fancy. Lum is a real person, and he really does fly a personal flying machine, typically around five times a day.

If you have $190,000 on hand, you, too, could buy one — or, if your budget is more modest, you can book a rental ride in a different kind of electric flying vehicle for $249. At long last, the era of the flying car is here.

But there is a catch: The EVTOLs that are currently available are not, strictly speaking, legal. The entire fledgling industry, such as it is, exists in a kind of shadowland, where it’s unclear what exactly the rules are and what will happen if you break them. For the manufacturers, it’s a gamble, the kind of regulatory arbitrage that could allow them to jump ahead of more careful, rule-following competitors and become an industry-dominating colossus like Airbnb or Uber or could devolve into lawsuits and enforcement actions. “Move fast and break things” is the Silicon Valley way, but it’s very much the opposite of the safety-first mind-set of the rest of the aviation industry, where if things crash and burn, they do so literally — and the public and government are not quick to forgive.

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The Real Goal of Israel’s Exploding-Pager Attack on Hezbollah

This article originally ran in New York magazine on September 18, 2024

The wave of exploding pagers that injured nearly 3,000 and killed at least nine, including a 9-year-old girl, in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday was a stunning and unexpected blow against Israel’s longtime foe, Hezbollah. While the sheer number of casualties will put a damper on the terrorist group’s ability to wage offensive action, physical incapacitation of enemy fighters likely wasn’t Israel’s primary goal. Rather, the move was likely aimed at creating fear and internal suspicion that would more significantly undermine the group’s ability to fight.

“It promulgates fear,” says Dr. Patrick Sullivan, director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. “It demonstrates to their enemy, ‘Hey, we can reach out and touch you anywhere, anytime.’ I would imagine that Hezbollah is significantly questioning who is in their ranks, who are their suppliers, and what vulnerabilities they have.”

In military science terms, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is described as asymmetric. Israel is a nation with a standing army and all the resources of a modern economy. Hezbollah is a paramilitary organization whose members are dispersed among the population of Lebanon. While they have fewer men and weapons than Israel, they can attack by surprise then melt away. (Hezbollah has used these sorts of hit-and-run tactics most recently in its ongoing shelling of Israel’s north.) You can’t destroy a guerrilla organization through the kind of direct, tank-on-tank attritional slugfest that Russia and Ukraine are currently waging. Instead, the core struggle is waged in the informational domain and the strategic objective is to degrade the psychological state of the enemy, according to Sullivan.

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The Creepy Coincidences of the Billionaire Superyacht Sinking

This article originally ran in New York magazine on August 26, 2024

The sinking of tech billionaire Mike Lynch’s yacht in a freak storm off the Sicilian coast last week certainly has to rank among the most bizarre fatal celebrity accidents in years. There was the weird coincidence that Lynch had just gotten acquitted after a yearslong legal battle over a multibillion-dollar fraud; the eerie synchrony of the same-day death of his co-defendant after being struck by car while jogging; the fact that the $40 million vessel had been described as virtually unsinkable; the fact no vessel that size had been sunk by a waterspout in centuries; and the fact that the area where it struck is not known for waterspouts. But perhaps the wildest thing about the whole saga is the yacht’s name, Bayesian.

It refers to a method of statistical calculation that was originally devised by an 18th-century Presbyterian minister, Thomas Bayes. Lynch named his yacht after Bayes’s method in recognition of its role in building his fortune. In short, he had honored a method of calculating probabilities — only to be killed aboard its namesake by an accumulation of wildly off-the-chart improbabilities.

“The irony is tragic,” says British science journalist Tom Chivers, who writes for Semafor and published a book this year on Bayesian statistics calledEverything Is Predictable. “It’s not a subtle irony. Bayes is the maths of prediction. This sequence of events is just spectacularly unlikely.”

It’s as if Charles Kane had been crushed to death under a giant rosebud.

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Cabin Pressure

This article originally ran in Sherwood News on July 29, 2024.

For fans of private-jet travel, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news first: the industry is thriving, as a wave of high-net-worth individuals have discovered the pleasures of being able to fly when you want, where you want, and how you want, no matter the price. Sales of private jets are booming, and charter companies are lavishing clients with add-ons that range from private chefs and in-flight wellness exercises to meetings with a Tibetan lama

The bad news: the entire industry faces imminent extinction thanks to regulatory pressure and political opposition amid global efforts to stem the climate crisis. “We have to push for a ban on private jets,” French climate activist Charlène Fleury told me. “This is the most polluting and the most unfair and the least necessary mode of transport.”

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For a Billionaire, Trump Flies a Crappy Plane

This article originally ran in New York magazine on June 11, 2024

If Donald Trump gets reelected in November, he’ll win a bonanza of benefits, including freedom from prison, the ability to jail Joe Biden, a $400,000 salary, and kinglike powers. He’ll also get a massive upgrade in the quality of his air travel, from his ’90s vintage 757 dubbed Trump Force One to the real Air Force One, a pair of heavily modified 747s worth billions.

To hear Trump tell it, that’s not much of an upgrade at all. He once told Rolling Stone that Air Force One is “a step down” from his 757 “in every way.”

But that’s pure delusion. Sure, Trump’s plane is big, and it has a shiny new paint job, but from a true private-jet aficionado’s point of view, those are about its only virtues. “It’s like if you wanted to brag about having a massive yacht, so you bought the Staten Island Ferry and converted it,” says a private-jet broker who prefers not to be identified. “That’s not something that people who really know yachts would find impressive.”

Trump Force One, you might say, is a poor man’s idea of a rich man’s plane — a big shiny bauble that behind the scenes is “a plane past its prime with decaying mechanics and exorbitant storage fees,” as CNN put it. Which raises the question: Why is a guy supposedly as rich as Trump is flying around in such a jalopy? According to Bloomberg, he’s worth $6.5 billion. People with this kind of wealth generally fly planes like the Gulfstream G650 or the Dassault Falcon 8X, the Porsches and Lamborghinis of the air. By comparison, Trump is flying a secondhand school bus.

It’s not really that complicated, though. To understand the crappiness of Trump’s plane, it helps to know a bit more about planes and Trump.

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The New Age of Sail

This article originally ran on June 6, 2024 in Sherwood News.

On a morning in May, an 78-year-old, 64-foot schooner named the Apollonia raised its sails and cast off from Hudson, New York. As it sailed south it was borne along the half-mile-wide river by a falling tide. The wind was not favorable. The Apollonia could make progress only by tacking at angles to the wind, a process that required three crew members to haul ropes pulling in the sails as the ship turned, before letting them out again once the ship reached its new heading. The ship zigzagged a hundred times before the crew called it quits and tied up for the night. 

In the following days other challenges awaited. At Poughkeepsie the crew was becalmed; at Ossining they had to wait for the tide to rise until the water was deep enough to dock. The most difficult stretch of the voyage lay at World’s End, a narrowing of the river near West Point, where the current runs strong and mountain slopes funnel the wind unpredictably. To get through, said the vessel’s captain, Sam Merrett, “you really have to understand the Hudson.”

A week after it set out, and a hundred miles downriver, the Apollonia at last docked at the One°15 Brooklyn Marina. A morning shower had soaked the deck and in the cabin rain gear was hung to dry. The crew looked tired but happy. What they’d accomplished was not much from a practical standpoint — unloading barrels of barley malt at breweries along the way and picking up assorted goods like grain, flour, beer, whiskey, and preserves to deliver to customers downstream — but from a symbolic perspective it could be seen as epic. The Apollonia is the first sail-powered vessel in decades to run cargo along the US coast, and while the ship and its technology are old, its goal is new and ambitious: to demonstrate effective ways to decarbonize the maritime transport industry by 2050. 

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Deep Dive MH370 #31: Season 1 Finale

To watch Deep Dive MH370 on YouTube, click the image above. To listen to the audio version on Apple Music, Spotify, or Amazon Music, click here.

For a concise, easy-to-read overview of the material in this podcast I recommend my 2019 book The Taking of MH370, available on Amazon.

We’ve been making this weekly podcast for eight months now, and it feels like we could literally go on forever. But having come this far, we’ve come to feel that the most productive way forward will be to take a pause, collect our breath, and consider how best to press forward. So we’ve decided to use this episode to mark an end of Season One. We’re going to rest and regroup for a spell before coming back with a freshly conceived Season Two.

[A practical note: while we’re on hiatus, I’m going to pause paid subscriptions, so that people on monthly plans won’t get charged until we return, and people with yearly plans will have their subscription period extended.]

At heart, our core motivating belief is that this is a profoundly important case and we want to do everything in our power to help the public understand it. So today we’re going to talk about six major advancements that we think we’ve made towards that goal over the last 30 episodes.

Before I do that, though, a quick sidenote: Over the past week, I was delighted to be invited onto “avgeek” podcast Next Trip Network. Hosts Doug and Drew invited me on to talk about both MH370 and the latest crisis at Boeing so I encourage anyone interested in these topics to check that out.

And now, onward to the six big things from Season 1:

Continue reading Deep Dive MH370 #31: Season 1 Finale

Deep Dive MH370 #30: A 777 Pilot Weighs In

Today we’re going to go deeper than we’ve ever gone before on a question that I’ve called the crux of the whole MH370 mystery, and which is newly important because a bunch of viral MH370 videos have come out that spend a lot of time discussing it and, I’ll argue, they’re getting it wrong. And it matters a great deal because these videos are shaping what the public thinks is a reasonable explanation of the mystery.

To help us with this important task we have with us a very special guest today, Juan Browne, an experienced airline pilot and the host of the popular aviation channel Blancolirio on YouTube.

Juan has been flying airplanes for a very long time, and most recently he’s been working as a first officer on 777 flights over the Atlantic, so he really knows aviation and he knows this plane in particular. I reached out to Juan because I knew he could help us understand a crucial but widely misundersood aspect of the MH370 mystery. Namely: how did MH370’s satcom get turned off, and get turned back on again?

Continue reading Deep Dive MH370 #30: A 777 Pilot Weighs In