Jeff Wise – Page 2 – science journalism

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.

Is Elon Musk’s Starship Doomed?

The future of SpaceX keeps blowing up, and no one knows if he can fix it.

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on July 21, 2025.

On a bright spring morning in 2023, SpaceX’s first fully assembled Starship launch vehicle stood at its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, ready for its debut. Gleaming in the sun, the most powerful rocket ever built stretched as high as an office tower. It was beautiful not just for the boldness and elegance of its design, but for what it represented: the next chapter in humanity’s voyage into space. Able to boost more than 100 tons into orbit, it meant that huge swarms of satellites would soon bring cheap data to the whole planet. With greater engine thrust than the Apollo program’s Saturn V and reusable, it would carry astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars.

A crowd of space enthusiasts had gathered to experience the moment, chanting along with the countdown clock, then cheering as the mighty engines let loose a wall of flame.

Then, four minutes after takeoff, the unmanned rocket blew up. The eruption of white smoke was met not with stunned silence, but whoops and cheers like you might hear at a fireworks finale. “This was a development test; this was the first test flight of Starship,” explained one of the live-broadcast presenters. “And the goal was to gather the data, as we said, clear the pad, and get ready to go again.” Mission accomplished.

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.

Can the U.S. Destroy Iran’s Deepest Nuclear Bunker?

This piece originally ran in New York magazine on June 18, 2025.

Is the U.S. planning an aerial attack against Iran’s nuclear-weapons program? On Tuesday, multiple reports revealed that President Donald Trump was considering joining Israel’s efforts to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. The same day, Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” then on Wednesday morning clarified, “That means I’ve had it … I give up, no more, then we go and blow up all the nuclear stuff that’s all over the place there.” But Trump also implied that he hadn’t made up his mind, saying, “I may do it, I may not do it, I mean nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

If the U.S. does attack Iran, one facility that’s likely to be in the crosshairs is the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant near the city of Qom, 75 miles south of Tehran. Buried some 250 feet under a mountain, the facility houses centrifuges used to enrich uranium to weapons-grade quality and is likely invulnerable to any kind of conventional bomb in Israel’s arsenal. The only weapon that could conceivably destroy it is America’s biggest non-nuclear bomb, the 15-ton GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP. Dropping a big bomb sounds like a simple enough process, and many media accounts have made it sound like the mission would be a piece of cake. But getting the ordinance onto the target through the teeth of a sophisticated air defense system would be a complex and dangerous process. Here’s how the U.S. military would likely go about it.

‘No One Wants to Think That Their Pilot Is Weird’

How Nathan Fielder channeled a longtime personal obsession into his most ambitious project yet.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on May 26, 2025.

A few months ago, as anticipation began to build for the second season of Nathan Fielder’s HBO series The Rehearsal, a back corner of Reddit began to vibrate with an exciting theory: that Fielder, a comedian known for his awkward and deadpan persona, was not only secretly an airplane pilot but was rated to fly a Boeing 737 passenger jet, an aircraft orders of magnitude larger and more challenging than anything recreational pilots fly. “If this is really him and this ends up on his show I’m gonna lose my mind,” someone wrote on r/aviation on February 22, alongside paperwork found on a public FAA database. “That’s an insane amount of time and dedication to put in and keep quiet for years just to pull off a bit. I hope this is really him and sees the light of day. It will only further cement my love for his work and make it legendary!”

As viewers of the season-two finale of The Rehearsal have since learned, that was no mere rumor. At the end of the six-episode season, which has taken Fielder on a winding odyssey through off-the-rails psychological experimentation in a quest to ostensibly make airline travel safer by improving pilot communication and mental health, we learn that Fielder’s immersion into aviation has led him not only to take flying lessons but to work his way up to becoming an actual 737 pilot, first flying a jet filled with actor-passengers and then finding work as a professional ferry pilot, delivering aircraft across oceans for pay. He’s become the very sort of creature whose behavior, watched from afar, spurred the project in the first place. All for the sake of making air travel incrementally safer.

Can Nathan Fielder Save You From Dying in a Plane Crash?

As an aviation journalist, I was skeptical of The Rehearsal. Then I talked to experts.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on May 19, 2025.

The early moments of the season-two premiere of The Rehearsal are not the stuff of conventional comedy. The episode, titled “Gotta Have Fun,”opens on a captain and first officer in the cockpit of a commercial jet as they prepare to land at a socked-in airport. The mood is tense. An instrument is malfunctioning. Terse words are exchanged. Alarms go off. A mechanical voice calls out: “Too low! Terrain!” Farm fields appear out of the fog. Noise and tumult. Flames leap and roar. The men lie slumped in the cockpit, dead.

Well, not really dead, because the scene is taking place in a simulator. The pilots are actors, pretending. The camera pans to Nathan Fielder, the show’s creator and star, as he glumly stands outside the cockpit in a soundstage.

Again, it’s not the stuff of conventional comedy, but Fielder is not a conventional comedian. In his breakout series Nathan for You, which ran for four seasons on Comedy Central, and season one of The Rehearsal on HBO, Fielder specialized in tackling real-world problems in the most obtuse and elaborate ways possible, with the extravagance of the solution often dwarfing the scale of the problem. In season one of The Rehearsal, he built a complete replica of Brooklyn’s Alligator Lounge, accurate down to the order of the spices in a tabletop spice rack, in order to help a trivia-night participant come clean about his educational status to a teammate. The humor, if you get it — not everyone does — springs from Fielder’s near-pathological level of commitment to increasingly absurd bits. But this time around, the stakes are not small. As a journalist who writes often about aviation safety, I’m acutely aware of just how real and widespread deadly air crashes are. What if, for once, the extravagance of Fielder’s solutions matched the scale of the problem?

You’ll Pay for the Upgrades to Trump’s Luxury 747 From Qatar

The “new” Air Force One is a grift.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on May 12, 2025.

You’d think that no one needs a new jet less than Donald Trump, who already owns his own customized Boeing 757 and, as president, has free use of a pair of heavily modified 747 jumbo jets that collectively make up Air Force One.

But both of his current rides suffer significant disadvantages that Qatar’s “flying palace” 747 would overcome. Over the weekend, ABC News and others reported the country’s royal family is set to donate a jet to the U.S. Air Force in order to be upgraded to carry the president — then transfer its ownership to Trump’s presidential library when he leaves office.

Air Force One’s main drawback for Trump is that he can’t take the planes with him after the White House. Though ownership of what I’ll call the BribeJet will technically be transferred from the Qatari government to the U.S., the point of the transaction is clearly to benefit Trump personally, as he will have exclusive use of it for the rest of his life. “I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer,” he said Monday. “I mean, I could be a stupid person say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’ But it was — I thought it was a great gesture.”

Who Attacked Flights Near the White House?

After a deadly midair collision in Washington, D.C., pilots started receiving alarms that they were next.

This article orginally appeared on May 9, 2025 in New York magazine.

On January 29, at 8:47 p.m., an American Airlines flight landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter a half-mile shy of the runway at an altitude of about 300 feet. Nineteen seconds prior to impact, the jet had received a warning about the helicopter’s presence when its Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) generated an audio alert — “TRAFFIC, TRAFFIC!” — and displayed a yellow dot on the cockpit navigation system’s screen. But further aural warnings were silenced by design once the plane descended below 900 feet, so as not to distract the pilots during landing. The dot on the navigation display remained, but the flight crew’s attention had turned to the runway coming up ahead of them. Everyone aboard both aircraft died.

The accident was the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial airliner in 16 years and the deadliest since 2001. So nerves were especially tense a month later, on the morning of March 1, when more than a dozen planes inbound for Reagan experienced similar warnings. As they were drawing near the airport, following the course of the Potomac River, TCAS audio alarms unexpectedly went off: “Traffic, traffic!” or “Descend, descend!” The pilots responded as they were trained to do, quickly putting their aircraft into a dive. But just as quickly, the flight crews realized that nothing was there. Visibility was good, and there was nothing to be seen ahead of them in the sky. The tower also saw nothing, either visually or on radar. The oncoming planes weren’t real, but some kind of electronic ghost.