Jeff Wise – science journalism

No Pilots. Few Air Traffic Controllers. What Could Go Wrong?

Normally, aviation is slow to embrace new technology—but AI has come for the skies.

This article originally ran in Wired magazine on November 14, 2026.

ON SEPTEMBER 27, US transportation secretary Sean Duffy posted a video on X with the words “GAME CHANGER.” “Introducing ‘SMART’—the new air traffic management tool that saves YOU time, cuts back DELAYS, and makes your flying experience BETTER,” he wrote. This was a new AI-infused air traffic control system. Almost three weeks later, that post would get a new life, as a nervous joke, as the FAA issued a national groundstop on Friday the 13th that instantly threw the world’s airline schedules into chaos. The administration quickly announced that there was no evidence of a cyberattack, and no sign that SMART had anything to do with the communications failure at the heart of the government’s decision to suspend flights. But when asked on Friday night whether he could definitively rule out AI failure, Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin could only say, “There’s nothing certain right now.”

New systems like SMART are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the AI aviation revolution currently underway. Take, for instance, the Cessna Caravan that took off from Buchanan Field Airport in Concord, California, and flew south to Phoenix on a calm September morning. The plane, a single-engine turboprop, then turned east to Fort Worth, stopped at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, and finally arrived at Dare County Regional Airport off the coast of North Carolina. The zigzag, coast-to-coast trip covered 3,200 miles; along the way, the aircraft navigated busy airspace and maneuvered to avoid storms.

None of this would be remarkable, save for one fact: The entire journey took place without a single human hand touching the plane’s controls.

The FlyDubai Near Miss Was a Nightmare and a Miracle

This article originally ran on September 30, 2026 in New York magazine.

The FlyDubai 737 MAX that almost crashed on Wednesday plummeted three miles in less than a minute and came so close to breaking the sound barrier that aerodynamic forces ripped off part of the plane’s rudder. In about a minute the plane would have hit the desert 250 miles southeast of Tel Aviv. Instead, passengers managed to subdue the attacker, while two pilots traveling in the passenger cabin regained control of the plane and landed it safely at Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

“It’s a miracle this aircraft survived, but let’s give credit to the two pilots who when they entered the cockpit found a badly configured aircraft headed for certain death,” says Mary Schiavo, a former Inspector General of the Department of Transportation who now practices aviation law at Motley Rice.

FlyDubai Flight 1073 had taken off from Dubai at 7:05am local time and climbed to 32,000 feet as it flew over the Nafud desert of northern Saudi Arabia, on its way to Tel Aviv. Two hours into the flight, as it approached the border of Jordan, one passenger said he heard someone shouting “Allahu Akbar”just before the plane nosed suddenly downward.

According to Israeli news media, one of the flight’s pilots, a citizen of Oman, stabbed the captain, a 39-year-old Indian national named Smit Machchhar, and pushed the controls forward. The plane quickly lost altitude as it accelerated to nearly the speed of sound. Parts of the aircraft might already have been supersonic, creating a sonic boom audible to anyone listening in the desert below.

Marine One’s Near-Miss Incident Was Scarier Than It Looks

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.

Wheels Up: Why So Many CEOs Become Pilots

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.

The Mysterious Case of the JetBlue Flight That Went Into Free Fall

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!”

A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military’s Tech to Blame?

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 disruptions across 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.

The white-knuckle air show where landing 10,000 planes is just the start

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.

A New Clue From the Night MH370 Vanished May Radically Change the Search for the Missing Plane

What if the ocean heard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crash—and everyone missed it? An exclusive investigation reveals a long-hidden scientific report that could reshape the hunt for the airliner, 12 years later.

This article orginally ran in Popular Mechanics on July 16, 2026.

JEAN-YVES ROYER COULDN’T STOP thinking about what his underwater microphones might have heard.

It was March 2014, days after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing and mysteriously vanished into the night with 239 people on board. Investigators would soon come to believe the Boeing 777 had flown south and crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, and searchers were urgently looking for the plane’s black boxes. But Royer, a scientist at the French government research organization CNRS, knew that something else was already waiting in those waters, potentially recording the sound of the airliner’s final moments: his network of autonomous hydrophones.

The network was called OHASISBIO, a French acronym meaning the Hydroacoustic Observatory of Seismicity and Biodiversity. Just weeks before MH370 disappeared on March 8, Royer’s team had moored hydrophones at six sites in the southern Indian Ocean, from the waters near Crozet and Kerguelen to the Madagascar Basin and the Southeast Indian Ridge. They were built to continuously record the ocean’s low-frequency sounds, including submarine earthquakes, volcanic eruptions on the seafloor, the calls of baleen whales, icequakes, ice tremors, and the background noise of a vast ocean in motion.

Now, Royer realized, they might also have captured something they were never designed to detect: the sound of a missing commercial jet hitting the sea.

The catch? He couldn’t listen yet.

Royer’s hydrophones didn’t stream their recordings back to shore. They were autonomous instruments moored far from land, storing recordings internally as they listened through the months after MH370 disappeared. Before Royer could search for the acoustic trace of a possible crash, he had to wait for the buoys to finish their mission, release from their moorings, and return to the surface in January and February 2015. Only then could his team recover them, download the recordings, and search the audio for the hours after MH370’s final satellite transmission for a sound loud enough to have come from a Boeing 777 hitting the Indian Ocean.

Can the Aral Sea be reborn?

A generation ago, the vanishing of the Aral Sea became global shorthand for environmental desolation. Today the region has become a test bed for a resilient future.

This article originally ran in the May, 2026 issue of National Geographic.

It was the first human-made ecological disaster of the modern era.

In 1960, the Aral Sea was the world’s fourth largest lake, a rich and productive ecosystem teeming with carp, bream, and other species—by one estimate, it provided a sixth of all fish consumed in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles across, the sea was a world unto itself for the people who lived and fished on its shores and for the sailors who crossed it.

But change was coming. In 1968, Pravda, the official state newspaper of the Soviet Union, carried a story with an astonishing prophecy. This world would soon vanish, it said. Already the water level had started to fall, and it would fall further, its edges creeping away from the fishing towns on its shores, the lake bed changing to desert. By the turn of the century, “essentially, the Aral Sea will no longer exist.”

There was no magic behind the prophecy—just math. In the preceding years, Soviet officials had built large-scale irrigation projects that diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the rivers that fed the Aral Sea, into cotton production. Without their inflow, there was nothing to replace the water lost naturally through evaporation. For a brief time, the region enjoyed the best of both worlds: the lake, with its productive fisheries and mild climate, and the cotton industry, with the hard cash it earned. But as the rivers turned away, the lake shrank and shrank to less than 10 percent of its mid-century footprint, leaving behind a salt-encrusted desert.

The prophecy had been duly engineered: The Aral Sea as such no longer existed. “From an environmental perspective, it was a huge mistake,” says Bulat Yessekin, an environmental policy expert who spent decades working on Central Asian water access issues with international nonprofit groups.

Today the Aral Sea stands not only as a worldwide symbol of catastrophe but also as the first domino to fall in a freshwater crisis. Iran’s Lake Urmia has also shrunk over the past half century by 90 percent, as has Lake Chad in Central Africa. In the United States, the Great Salt Lake in Utah has become so salty because of water loss that its brine shrimp are at risk of dying out. All these crises are tied together with the pressures of human population growth and climate change.

But some conservationists are now looking to the fate of the Aral Sea and asking another question: If humanity can create ecological disaster, can we also undo it?

A Manned NASA Rocket Is About to Take Off for the Moon. There Are Questions About Its Safety.

A heat-shield expert has major worries about Artemis II.

This article appeared in New York magazine’s Intelligencer section on March 31, 2026.

Some time during the first week of April, a 322-foot NASA rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center and soar deep into outer space, carrying its crew of four astronauts farther from Earth than humans have been in half a century. The Orion space capsule will loop around the moon, passing within 5,000 miles of the cratered surface, and then return to Earth. Turning its heat shield to the upper atmosphere, it will use aerodynamic braking to slow from a speed of 25,000 mph to just 300 mph, at which point it will deploy parachutes and splash down in the Pacific. Humanity will have returned to the moon and come home safely again.

That’s what NASA’s experts say will happen, anyway.

A guy on the internet disagrees.

Charles Camarda, a 73-year-old retiree living in Virginia, has been posting on LinkedIn and X, saying NASA has miscalculated and the Artemis IIrocket could fail catastrophically. To be clear, he is one guy, posting as a private citizen, with no institutional backing and no notable public figures standing by his side. It’s just him, one of a bazillion lone voices on the internet trying to set the world straight.

But one thing is different about Camarda that sets him apart from all those other dudes and makes his quixotic quest worth paying attention to: There is not a single person on Earth more qualified on this particular subject than he is.

“People need to listen to Charlie because he knows what he’s talking about,” says Eileen Collins, the former astronaut who made history as the first female commander of a space-shuttle mission. “He’s a high-integrity person, and his technical background is very deep.”