Aviation – Jeff Wise

‘Love Story’ Got JFK Jr’s Final Flight Wrong in So Many Ways

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.

Here’s How the Fatal La Guardia Collision Happened, Second by Second

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.

We’re in a New Kind of War

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on Wednesday, March 11, 2026.

At the opening of the air war against Iran, the U.S. and Israel won a massively one-sided victory that left Iran’s defenses in tatters and much of its leadership dead. “We achieved air superiority within two days, if that,” says Mark Gunzinger, an analyst at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. But just because a war starts well doesn’t mean it will end that way. “The enemy gets a vote,” as former secretary of Defense James Mattis liked to say.

Within hours of the opening salvos, Iran responded with barrages of its own, though of a different nature. Its air force neutralized, Iran turned to waves of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. Though these were cheap and lo-fi compared with U.S. weapons, the Iran counterstrike took a surprisinglypainful toll with a single drone killing six American soldiers at a base in Kuwait. Amid the confusion, a Kuwaiti F-18 fighter jet reportedly shot downthree U.S. F-15 fighters, the most ever lost in combat. By the second week of the conflict, Iran had also destroyed some of America’s most sophisticated radar systems, each of which costs $500 million, and taken down 11 hi-tech Reaper drones with a total cost of $330 million.

At the same time, Iran was going after civilian targets in the region, raining down drones and missiles day after day on Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. In addition to targeting U.S. military bases in those countries, it went after critical oil-production facilities, desalination plants, data centers, and logistics hubs like airports. On Tuesday, the UAE shut down the Ruwais oil refinery, one of the largest in the world, following an Iranian strike. Iran’s most impactful measure has been to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which sent oil prices soaring around the world.

In short, while Iran has been all but helpless at the game the United States and Israel were playing, it has a playbook of its own: dragging the U.S. into a type of warfare very different from any it has faced directly. This new kind of battle space, which has evolved at hyperspeed during the four years of war in Ukraine, effectively tips the playing field in favor of the underdog. “The Iranians had a plan all along, and now they’re going out and doing the plan,” says retired F-16 fighter pilot John Waters. “They’re striking back.”

The Latest MH370 Search Implies Something Unusual Happened

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on December 3, 2025.

The on-again, off-again search for the wreckage of the Malaysian airliner that went missing 11 years ago is back on. On Wednesday, the country’s transportation ministry announced that marine-survey company Ocean Infinity would begin scanning the Indian Ocean seabed on December 30, with the project set to take 55 days, conducted “intermittently.”

MH370, which took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014, was scheduled as a red-eye flight to Beijing and carried 239 passengers and crew members. But the Boeing 777 went electronically dark 40 minutes into the flight, and mysterious satellite communications signals later indicated that it had flown to a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean before evidently crashing. Only a few dozen pieces of debris have ever been found.

The new search appears to be a continuation of an effort Malaysia first announced last November, when it said Ocean Infinity would be searching about 6,000 square miles under the terms of a “no find, no fee” deal that would see Malaysia pay the company $70 million only if it found the plane’s wreckage.

The Last Flight of PAT 25

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.

Air Travel Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better

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.

Get Ready for an Air Travel Meltdown

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.

Will Air-Traffic Controllers End the Government Shutdown?

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.

The Debate Over the Air India Crash: Was It Suicide?

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on July 15, 2025.

The release over the weekend of the preliminary report on last month’s deadly crash of an Air India flight has stirred controversy in the aviation community with some asserting that the crash could have been caused only by pilot suicide.

Prior to the report’s release, speculation had swirled for weeks about the cause of the June 12 crash with commentators struggling to interpret grainy video and incomplete tracking data to explain why the plane rose only a few hundred feet after takeoff, then sank back toward the ground before striking the campus of a medical college, killing 19 on the ground and all but one of the 242 people aboard the plane. Some wondered if contaminated fuel might have caused an engine failure or if the flight crew had incorrectly configured the flaps or landing gear.

The 15-page report, which includes information gleaned from the black boxes, puts much of that speculation to rest.

According to the report, the Boeing 787 began its takeoff roll at Ahmedabad’s international airport at 1:37 p.m. The first officer, 32-year-old Cliver Kunder, was at the flight controls in the cockpit’s right seat with the captain, 56-year-old Sumeet Sabharwal, sitting to his left. Assuming that they were following normal procedure, Sabharwal would have been keeping his right hand on the throttle levers, ready to pull the engines to idle if he felt he needed to abort the takeoff.

Six Books to Read Before You Get to the Airport

The fact that we regularly float six or seven miles above the Earth is worth our fascination and attention.

This article originally appeared in The Atlantic on August 8, 2025.

The modern air-travel industry goes to great lengths to prevent passengers from having to think about what they’re doing. When everything goes right, the airlines’ practiced, cheerful funneling and cajoling, plus the snacks and in-seat entertainment, make the experience feel anodyne and efficient. When delays stack up, luggage gets lost, or unexpected turbulence hits, passengers get antsy—and the more anxious among them may start to dwell on the mortal risk inherent in flying, at least until flight attendants provide fresh beverages. Air carriers’ reliance on distraction is a shame, because the fact that we regularly float six or seven miles above the Earth is worth our fascination and attention. A better way to dispel anxieties about flying might be to explore the feat of aviation. The six books below explain the art and science of piloting, and riding in, aircraft from a range of perspectives: poetic and technical, celebratory and cautionary. Together, they elucidate the marvel that is the contemporary air-transport system and bring to life the remarkable people whose struggles and triumphs brought it to fruition. Yes, flying is safe—but it’s also much more interesting than that.