Jeff Wise

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.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

Some experts suspect that a series of aviation incidents traces back to Russian aggressors. The sophistication only rivals the potential for danger—and the sky’s the limit.

This article originally appeared in Vanity Fair on April 24, 2025.

First, smoke curled out from the cube of packages stacked on a pallet at a DHL logistics hub near Birmingham, England, last July. Then a lick of flame emerged from the top of the stack. Racing to prevent the fire from spreading, a forklift operator snatched up the burning pallet and dashed away with it, setting it down at a safe remove before the stack turned into a roaring bonfire.

Not long after, 600 miles to the east, inside another DHL logistics hub in Leipzig, Germany, a similar scene played out. Then, according to Polish media, a third courier-related fire started near Warsaw. Polish officials say they intercepted yet another device before it went off and arrested at least four suspects. Another suspect was arrested in Lithuania, according to The Wall Street Journal, and charged with sending four of the devices from the capital city of Vilnius.

Video shows the spinning rotors separating in midair from the fuselage.

This article originally appeared in New York magazine on April 11, 2025.

The tourist helicopter that crashed into the Hudson River on Thursday afternoon appears to have fallen victim to a well-known hazard known as “mast bumping,” according to aviation experts. Eyewitness video showed the rotors and the body of the helicopter separating in midair. The phenomenon is unique to helicopters with semi-rigid rotors, like the Bell 206L4 LongRanger that fell out of the sky while flying a family of Spanish tourists. The pilot, two adult passengers and three children were all killed.

The phenomenon of mast bumping arises from the physics of the rotor blades. Each helicopter blade is like a long, thin wing that generates lift as it carves through the air. Spinning at high speed, the blades form a whirring disk. The blades are attached to a hub that in turn is connected to a mast that projects vertically upward from the transmission. To visualize the relationship of the mast and the rotor hub, says Robert Joslin, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Daytona, Florida, “Think of a drinking cup upside down on the top of a broom handle. If you just move it back and forth a little bit, it won’t touch. But if you go real hard, the rim will hit the handle.” In the case of the helicopter, the hub is a fast-spinning hunk of metal that could bend the mast or break it altogether, severing the rotor and sending it flying.