Jeff Wise

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.

Two Army helicopter pilots went on an ill-conceived training mission. Within two hours, 67 people were dead.

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on January 29, 2026

One year ago, on January 29, 2025, two Army pilots strapped into a Black Hawk helicopter for a training mission out of Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia and, two hours later, flew it into an airliner that was approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, killing all 67 aboard both aircraft. It was the deadliest air disaster in the United States in a quarter-century. Normally, in the aftermath of an air crash, government investigators take a year or more to issue a final report laying out the reasons the incident occurred. But in this case, the newly seated U.S. president, Donald Trump, held a press conference the next day and blamed the accident on the FAA’s DEI under the Biden and Obama administrations. “They actually came out with a directive, ‘too white,’” he claimed. “And we want the people that are competent.”

In the months that followed, major media outlets probed several real-world factors that contributed to the tragedy, including staffing shortages at FAA towers, an excess of traffic in the D.C. airspace, and the failure of the Black Hawk to broadcast its location over ADS-B — an automatic reporting system — before the collision. To address this final point, the Senate last month passed the bipartisan ROTOR Act, which would require all aircraft to use ADS-B — “a fitting way to honor the lives of those lost nearly one year ago over the Potomac River,” as bill co-sponsor Ted Cruz put it.

At a public meeting on Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board laid out a list of recommended changes in response to the crash, criticizing the FAA for allowing helicopters to operate dangerously close to passenger planes and for allowing professional standards to slip at the control tower.

What has gone unexamined in the public discussion of the crash, however, is why these particular pilots were on this mission in the first place, whether they were competent to do what they were trying to do, what adverse conditions they were facing, and who was in charge at the moment of impact. Ultimately, while systemic issues may have created conditions that were ripe for a fatal accident, it was human decision-making in the cockpit that was the immediate cause of this particular crash.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on November 10, 2025

Even if it ends in the coming days, the government shutdown won’t bring immediate relief from air-travel chaos, according to aviation experts. Airlines and air-traffic controllers alike will have significant work ahead of them in unraveling the mess that has built up over the course of the 41-day-and-counting shutdown. The aftereffects could even linger into the Thanksgiving travel period.

“You’ve got controllers who are clearly fatigued and will need to get caught up on rest,” says John Illson, a former airline pilot and Federal Aviation Administration official. “And because airline schedules have been disrupted, crew and aircraft are out of position, so flights will continue to be delayed or canceled.”

To be sure, the overall picture looks better than it did before Sunday night, when a group of Senate Democrats decided to break ranks and side with Republicans in a deal to reopen the government.

The air-travel industry had experienced steadily worsening delays and cancellations in the week after controllers missed their first full paycheck last Tuesday. On Wednesday, the FAA ordered airlines to begin reducing their number of flights at 40 major airports starting that Friday. With their plans scrambled, airlines struggled to accommodate stranded travelers, as every canceled flight meant that aircraft and flight crews weren’t where they were supposed to be.

The shutdown and Thanksgiving are about to collide.

This article orginally appeared in New York magazine on November 7, 2025

After more than a month under the mounting pressure of the U.S. government shutdown, the national air-travel system now appears to be in the early stages of collapse with the FAA announcingWednesday that it intends to reduce airline flights by 10 percent at 40 of the nation’s busiest airports.

The cuts will be phased in gradually with a reduction of 4 percent on Friday, 5 percent on Saturday, 6 percent on Sunday, and a full 10 percent next week. As of 7 a.m. today, the aviation data company Cirium stated that 739 flights, amounting to 3 percent of Friday’s originally scheduled flights, had been cancelled. By next week, if the government meets its goal, as many as 4,000 flights per day could be canceled.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy had previously indicated that even more severe reductions might be in the offing. “You will see mass flight delays, you’ll see mass cancellations, and you may see us close certain parts of the airspace because we just cannot manage it because we don’t have the air-traffic controllers,” he said at a press conference.

Until this week, the system had been holding up surprisingly well. “The system got off the hook because October is one of the slower travel months of the year,” says Erik Hansen, head of government relations at the U.S. Travel Association. Even though the lack of pay has led to an increasing number of air-traffic controllers missing work, that has not yet resulted in significant flight delays. Cirium reports that through last week, there was only one day — the day before Halloween — on which flight delays were significantly worse than usual, and that was partly attributable to bad weather.

They’ve forced Trump to surrender before, and the flight delays are only getting started.

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on October 8, 2025.

Air-traffic controllers make up less than half of one percent of the federal workforce, but when it comes to a government shutdown, they wield disproportionate power. During the prior shutdown, which started in December 2018, the biggest factor in forcing President Donald Trump to back down was their fast-growing resistance. This time, it looks as if they might stare him down again — maybe even faster.

Back then, the country’s longest shutdown was in its fifth week when controllers started to call in sick. They had missed a paycheck, and some were reportedly having to work second jobs. “You start wondering whether you’re going to have enough money to pay all the bills,” says a retired controller who was on duty during that shutdown.

All it took was ten controllers skipping work to cause delays that snarled more than 600 flights. Those ten were a minuscule fraction of the more than 10,000 controllers employed by the Federal Aviation Administration. But with control towers chronically understaffed, it didn’t take many absences for the system to start to seize up, and it was clear that worse lay ahead. Trump capitulated within hours.

This time around, things are unraveling much faster.