Today, Explained - A comedian tries to fix aviation

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

Newark’s crisis is coming soon to an airport near you. Thankfully, comedian Nathan Fielder is dead serious about aviation safety. This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. The actor Nathan Fielder in HBO's The Rehearsal. Photograph by John P. Johnson/HBO. Help us plan for the future of Today, Explained by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

American aviation has been having a tough year. The crashes. An American Airlines flight with 64 people on board colliding midair with a Blackhawk military helicopter. The urgent search underway after a deadly crash, plane crash in Alaska. The air traffic controllers. The systems are really old. They should have been updated a long time ago. The Newark. We lost radar contact lock.

We lost our radar. And as you'll hear on today explained, it might get rougher before it gets better. But you're also gonna hear about a Canadian comedian who's deadly serious about one particular solution. He thinks pilots would crash less if they were simply better at talking to each other. The captain has made a decision.

The first officer understands it's wrong, but the first officer doesn't feel they have the ability to speak up about it. We're gonna ask if he's got a point. Support for this show comes from Sonos. Experience high quality, balanced sound at any volume, anytime with Sonos. You can build a custom sound system that perfectly fits your needs, preferences and living space. Whether you're enjoying a podcast inside or taking your music on the go,

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My name is Darrell Campbell. I'm an aviation safety writer for The Verge and author of Fatal Abstraction, How the Manager... Fuck shit. I fucked that up. Alright, we got it out of the way. I'll do it again. Why the managerial class loses control of software. Darryl Campbell recently wrote about the problems we've been seeing at Newark Liberty International Airport for The Verge.

But his take was that this isn't just a Newark, New Jersey problem. This isn't even just a tri-state area problem. This is systemic. So you've probably seen some of the news articles about it. And it's really, again, only in the last couple of months, because everybody's been paying attention to aviation safety, that people are really saying, oh my gosh, there's, you know, the Newark airport, they're losing the ability to see airplanes, they're losing radar for minutes at a time.

And that's not something you want to hear when you got airplanes flying towards each other at 300 miles an hour. So it is rightfully very concerning. But the thing is, what's been happening at Newark has actually been happening for almost a decade and a half. And it's in sort of fits and starts, it'll get really bad and then it'll get better again. But now we're seeing a combination of air traffic control problems. We're seeing a combination of infrastructure problems. And they've got a runway that's entirely shut down.

And the way that I think about it is, you know, while Newark is its own special case today, all of the problems that it's facing other than the runway are problems that every single airport in the entire country is going to be facing over the next five to 10 years. And so we're really getting a preview of what's going to happen if we don't see some drastic change in the way

that the air traffic control system is maintained. Yeah, I mean, we heard about some of these issues after the crash at DCA outside Washington. What exactly is going on with air traffic controllers? So the first problem is just one of staff retention and training. So on the one hand, the air traffic control system and the people who work there, they're a pretty dedicated bunch, but it just takes a long time to get up to the point where you're actually entrusted with airplanes. So it can be up to four years of training from the moment that you decide, okay, I want to be an air traffic controller. So couple that with the fact that these are government employees and like many other

agencies, they haven't really gotten the cost of living increases to keep pace with the actual cost of living, especially in places like the New York, New Jersey area where it's just gone up way faster than in the rest of the country. Hmm. So this is bad at Newark, but you say it promises to get bad everywhere else too. Yeah, I think the cost of living is still outpacing the replacement level at a lot of these air traffic control centers. And then the washout rate, just of the people who are learning for the first time, is actually pretty high. We've seen the average staffing level at a lot of American airports get down below 85, 80 percent, which is really where the FAA wants it to be, and it's getting worse over time. And then at Newark,

in particular, it's down to about 58 percent, I think, as of the first quarter of this year. So this is an emergency level of staffing at a baseline. And then on top of that, you have in order to keep the airplanes going, you've got people working mandatory overtime, mandatory six day a week shifts, and that's just accelerating that burnout that naturally happens.

So there's just a lot of compression and a lot of bad things happening independently, but all at the same time in that kind of labor system that's really making it difficult to both hire and retain qualified air traffic controllers. These sound like very fixable problems, Darryl. Are we trying to fix them? I know former reality TV star and Fox News correspondent

and transportation secretary in this day and age, Sean Duffy has been out to Newark. What we are going to do when we get the money, we have the plan, we actually have to build a brand new state of the art air traffic control system. Yeah, and you know, to his credit, they have announced some improvements on it. They've announced a lot of new funding for the FAA. They've announced an acceleration of hiring, but it's just a short-term fix.

So to put it in context, the FAA's budget usually allocates about $1.7 billion in maintenance fees every year. And so they've announced a couple more billion dollars, but their backlog is already 5.2 billion in maintenance. And these are things like replacing outdated systems, replacing buildings that are housing some of these radars, things that you really need to just get the system to where it should be operating today, let alone get ahead of the maintenance things that are going to happen over the next

couple of years. And it's really this fight between the FAA and Congress where everybody's willing to have a photo op to say, yeah, we're going to do a lot today to fix these problems. It has been nearly one year since the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 was signed into law. I was proud to co-lead that effort in the Senate. I was proud to help get it across the finish line. And we gave the FAA clear marching orders. Hire more air traffic controllers, modernize outdated technology,

replace systems that are unsafe or unstable. And it works for a little while, but then three years down the road, the same problems are really still occurring. You got that one-time shot of new money, but then the government cuts back again and again and again. And then you're really just kind of putting out one fire, but not addressing sort of the root cause of why there's all this dry powder everywhere. Which leaves people feeling unsafe, obviously. Yeah. People are canceling their flights into or out of Newark, but there are also all these smaller accidents we're seeing most recently in San Diego.

This morning, horrific new doorbell video showing the moment a plane clipped power lines and slammed into a San Diego neighborhood, erupting into a fireball. The investigation now intensifying. Officials saying all six people on board the Cessna 550 were killed. The pilot did not report any problems to air traffic control and he did not declare an emergency. How should people be feeling about that?

The last time we spoke, you said the only way to make sure there are no plane crashes is to ground all the planes. So there's really no silver bullet and all the choices are, let's say, not great to actively bat at baseline. So number one is you get the government to pay what it actually costs to run the air traffic control system. That empirically has not happened for decades. So I don't know that we're going to get to do it, especially under this administration, which is really focused on cutting costs. The second thing is pass on fees to flyers themselves.

So that sort of $1500 that we charge in the US, maybe that gets bumped up to 5000. But then airlines are going to pass that on to the customer. And it's just like the conversation that, you know, Wal-Mart's having with tariffs is that, you know, they don't want to do it when they try to pass it on to the customer. President Trump yells at them, and it's just not a great situation. The third option is to just reduce the number of flights in the sky.

I mean, part of this is that airlines are just competing to have the most flights, the most convenient schedules, the most options for your routing, and that's really just led to this logjam at places like Newark, where you really have these constraints on it. I mean, right before all of this stuff happens, Newark was serving about 80 airplanes an hour.

So 80 landings and takeoffs. Today, the FAAs actually started to admit restrictions on it, and now it's closer to 56 flights an hour. And that's probably the level that it can actually handle and not have these issues where you've got radars coming out and planes actually becoming in danger. But no airline wants to hear, hey, you have to cut your flight schedule.

And in fact, we saw that with United that their CEO was saying that the air traffic controllers who took trauma leave had walked off the job, which seemed to suggest that he didn't think they should be taking trauma leave because just got to have more planes coming in. And yeah, that's a competitive disadvantage for him, but you've also got to balance safety. I mean, you know, it's difficult to understand. It costs a lot of money to fix.

This is your textbook, why governments fail case study. And it's not really reassuring that, you know, in 24 hours I'm going to be in the middle of it again, trying to fly out of Newark. You're leaving in 24 hours? Yeah. Oh man. Well, that's what the schedule says. Let's see what time I actually get out.

Daryl Campbell's flight out of Newark Liberty International Airport was delayed. His book is called... Fatal Abstraction, How the Managerial... Shoot, fuck. Why the managerial class loses control of software. And you can read him at TheVerge.com, flying for you when we land back on Today Explained. Support for today explained comes from Shopify. Entrepreneurs know that when you're building a business, you have to wear too many hats. I think there was one of these recently where they had me name all the hats and I kind of

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business needs that's vanta.com slash explain. This is Today Explained. Okay, so first and foremost, the rehearsal is funny in an absurdist humor kind of way. The second season of the show, which just concluded this past Sunday, is all about aviation safety, but in ways you'd never expect. You'll see Nathan Fielder, the starring creator and director of the show, try to boost a pilot's confidence by having a group of actors follow him around and echo everything he says. So what do you want to do? That's a good question.

Yeah, a good question. I've got the fish tank over there if you want to learn about fish. I can be that nerd. Yeah! You'll see Fielder himself transform into the hero pilot Sully Sullenberger to better understand how Sully performed the miracle on the Hudson. Sully announces the decision to attempt a landing in the Hudson River. Okay, let's get the flaps out.

Put the flaps out. Flaps out. You'll see an American Idol style singing competition judged exclusively by pilots. And the home of the brave. Ilya, that was great. Unfortunately, you're not moving on. But this is also a show where you'll see Nathan Fielder

become a fully licensed pilot in order to fly a bunch of people around on a Boeing 737 to understand what that's like. This isn't commitment to a bit. Pilot and aviation journalist Jeff Wise says, this isn't a bit at all. Because Nathan Fielder, the actual person, while not making people laugh, his hobby,

one of his hobbies, is reading accident reports. He got obsessed with this Canadian TV show called May Day, which looks at all these different crashes throughout history and what caused them. On a cold day in Northern Ontario, a passenger jet is unable to climb above the trees. I thought, oh my God, we're in a crash. And he noticed a trend, which is a real actual thing, which is that there are failures of pilots

and co-pilots to communicate. It seems as though the communication issues between first officers and captains in regards to assertiveness is possibly the number one contributing factor to commercial airline crashes in history and it has not been solved. He believes that this aspect of what's called CRM, crew resource management in the field, needs to be improved, Training needs to be improved,

and that this will help aviation safety. Crew resource management is the idea that a flight crew is more than the sum of its parts. This dynamic between captains and first officers is one of maybe the leading cause of commercial airline crashes in history. It's not the sole cause of the crash, but had someone asserted themselves, the plane might not have gone down.

It's not just a captain doing the captain's job and the first officer doing the first officer's job, but the interaction between them is really important and the field really Got its wings as you could say back in the 70s when there was a Still to this day the most fatal air accident that ever happened Where these two seven four seven, heavily laden with tourists,

were maneuvering around in the fog at Tenerife Airport in the Canary Islands. One was about to take off. The other one had not yet left the runway, but the first one couldn't tell because it was so foggy. The first officer, as they're about to take off, the first officer says, I don't think the runway is clear. And the captain's like, yeah, we're good.

And they take off and they hit the other plane. And hundreds and hundreds of people died. And so it was realized, well, the problem is that somebody on the flight deck understood that there was a potentially major problem, but they weren't able to communicate it to the person who was in the controls of the aircraft at that time.

So you had a lot of people talking about this thing, people in the industry started really taking it more seriously. Now CRM is mandated as part of the training, as Nathan, and Nathan talks about it in the show, he feels that it's, even though it's mandated, it isn't sufficient. They don't really do a very good job. Why don't you say that the training could be improved?

The training could be improved because right now it's terrible. No, I wouldn't go that far. There is a void in some training programs. You said it was bad. It is bad. The outcome is bad. It's bad. It is bad. The outcome is bad. It's bad. So Nathan's argument is that there's a big difference between being told something in a PowerPoint presentation,

or reading it in a book, or your teacher telling you about it in a classroom. There's a big difference between that and actually doing it in the cockpit. Right, you spoke to a number of pilots, aviation experts about this show. What did they have to tell you about what Nathan was arguing and the real world implications?

There's a whole field. It's a small field, but it's a field of academic study of this particular subset of CRM where people talk, it's called safety voice. Britain and Europe have different equivalents of the FAA, but they both require a significant amount of time spent getting certified in a particular skill, but they both require a significant amount of time spent getting certified in a particular skill called MCC,

which stands for Multi-Crew Cooperation. And the idea is that when you learn how to fly, you're flying alone, and then when you start to become an airline pilot, you're now in a situation where you have to cooperate. And as I said, the flight crew is more than the sum of its parts. You have to learn how to deal with this other person

and work cooperatively, share the information that you need to share, listen, speak, all that. And so they have a whole course that's devoted just to that and involves a lot of simulator time. So they're pretty much doing, you could argue, exactly what Nathan's proposing. There was a study that one of these researchers did where they asked, they did a survey of pilots

and they asked them like, how do you feel about improving your communication skills? And a lot of pilots were like, that sounds like girl stuff. Wow, girl stuff is not dying, but I'm, consider me a girl. Yeah. Although I'm not a very serious pilot myself.

I haven't dedicated my life to it the way that a professional pilot has, but I do spend a fair bit of time amongst pilots. And I do think that there is a pilot culture. I think that pilots have a certain kind of character to them. And I think that there's a reason for that. You are doing a life or death thing.

You have to have your ducks in a row. You have to fundamentally take it seriously, or you're not gonna be around very long. And so pilots have a certain kind of no-nonsense attitude. But there is something I think really smart about recognizing that humility, for instance. I mean, I think humility is an important concept, both for doctors in the surgical suite and for pilots and captains in the cockpit.

Do you think Nathan Fielder, you know, shining a light on this issue on an HBO show that, you know, despite its serious themes, is ultimately entertainment, could move the needle in any significant way? In theory it could, but I think there's a major caveat to that, which is that we do not live in normal times. There's all saying regulations are written in blood. Mm.

Well, more than major drivers of regulatory change in aviation has been plane crashes, people dying. And so a lot of the rules that you see in that rule book are there because at least one person died. And so if your attitude is, every time you wanna put in a new rule, we're gonna take 10. Nobody can even believe the numbers

that promise to eliminate 10 old regulations for every new regulations. Well, that's just opening up the door to more people dying. Regulations are every new regulation. Well that's just opening up the door to more people dying. Regulations are written in blood and Nathan Fielder's very funny, deeply absurd second season of the rehearsal, which is all about aviation safety, comes at a time, debuts in a year where we have seen one of the worst accidents in American aviation history, especially in recent American aviation history.

I think the worst probably this century. So what happened was the helicopter was flying along this very narrow route, required the helicopter to be below 200 feet, which is quite low. And with, you know, hugging the bank of the river, and the supervising pilot, who is kind of the trainer of the pilot

who was actually at the controls, said, you are out of your lane, you're too far away from the bank, and she was also too high. And we don't know what exactly was going on. We don't know if she didn't hear or she heard and chose not to obey or whatever. But for whatever reason,

this is a classic case of cockpit communications failure where somebody knew that there was a problem, somehow was unable to convey that information to the pilot at the controls and catastrophe resulted. So this is exactly, I mean, it's uncanny that this is exactly what he's talking about. Nathan Fielder made this show last year, maybe the year before that, it seems like he started training to be a pilot

at least two years ago. It comes out mere months after the exact thing he's trying to fix in this show happens and kills dozens of people over DC airspace. Yeah. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, frankly, and it was one of the things I wanted to ask him about. How did it feel to him? Because on the one hand, it's horrific.

I mean, it's the kind, I mean, one wishes one's predictions to come true except when they're horrible predictions. And that's what happened. And he said, his answer to the question was he wasn't surprised that he thought it was just a matter of time. And the timing was really uncanny,

but this really demonstrates the stakes. This is not merely someone thumping on a tub or using it as an excuse to make a TV show. It really, really underlies just how serious this comedy show is at its core. Jeff Wise has been writing about the second season of the rehearsal for Vulture. You can read and subscribe at vulture.com. Jeff's got a podcast all about the disappearance

of that Malaysia Airlines flight back in 2014. It's called Finding MH370. You can listen where you listen and you can of course watch the rehearsal on HBO or Max or HBO Max or whatever it's called this week. Thank you Andrew Tangle from the Wall Street Journal for helping with this episode that Devin Schwartz produced, Amin Al-Sadi edited, Laura Bullard fact-checked, and Andrea Christensdottir and Patrick Boyd mixed. I'm Sean Ramisforum, this is Today Explained. you