Jeff Wise – Page 3 – science journalism

Exploding Cargo. Hacked GPS Devices. Spoofed Coordinates. Inside New Security Threats in the Skies.

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.

Why a Helicopter Broke Apart Over the Hudson River

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.

Would You Buy a Fighter Jet From Donald Trump?

How the president spoiled the F-35, America’s most popular warplane.

This article orginally ran in New York magazine on March 24, 2025.

Not so long ago, the F-35 fighter jet was the hottest ticket in the international arms market. Though it had suffered teething pains in development, going over budget by 50 percent in its first decade, Lockheed Martin’s Lightning II glowed up into a remarkably capable weapons platform. Stealthy, supersonic, and able to both dogfight and strike targets on the ground, it’s arguably the most sophisticated weapon in the U.S. arsenal and undeniably the most sought-after. As nation after nation held competitions to choose their next frontline fighter, the F-35 came in and trounced its rivals time and again. “I can’t think of a competition that it entered in Europe that it didn’t win,” says Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Anywhere Lockheed Martin pitched the F-35, it wound up getting chosen.” Today, some 18 years after its first flight, more than 1,000 F-35s are in operation in 20 countries.

But then, earlier this month, something happened. One after another, nations that had signed up for the F-35 started voicing qualms. On March 13, Portugal’s defense minister said that the country would cancel plans to buy the plane. Then Canada’s prime minister said it would reconsider its purchase. Germany, too, is said to be wavering in its commitment to the jet.

Nothing had changed about the plane’s performance. It’s just that, in the eyes of some international customers, the F-35 can’t fully be trusted anymore because of who is the commander-in-chief. Donald Trump has an affinity for authoritarianism, has exhibited poor treatment of NATO (whose Article 5 obligates collective defense), and, in particular, has threatened to annex Greenland and Canada.

Why Air Travel’s Getting Dangerous

The Trump administration has been aggressively pursuing policies that will make travelers’ odds inevitably worse.

This article originally ran on Slate on March 3, 2025.

Nervous air travelers might be forgiven for feeling a little more anxious than usual since the start of the Trump administration. Only nine days in, a horrific midair collision between an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter ended a 16-year streak without a fatal U.S. airline crash. Then, two days later, a medevac jet nosedived into a busy Philadelphia street, killing all six aboard and one person on the ground. Then, a week later, a private jet slammed into a larger parked jet while landing in Arizona, killing the first plane’s pilot. And a week after that a Delta flight flipped upside down while landing in Toronto.

Was the Trump administration directly responsible for the surge in air disasters? The timing seems uncanny, but no. Whatever his flaws, Trump plainly does not deserve blame for this particular mess, which stems from a combination of bad luck and institutional failings that have been accumulating for years.

What is also plain, however, is that since it has come to power, the Trump administration has been aggressively pursuing policies that will make travelers’ odds inevitably worse. So is commercial aviation still remarkably safe? Yes. Is it about to get dramatically less safe? Also yes.

Here are some of the problems that already exist, and why they’ll get worse.

Why This Search for MH370 Could Be Different

If it’s not found, much of the story we’ve been told will turn out to be false.

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

The third search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has begun, 11 years after the plane practically vanished. On Sunday, a ship belonging to the American maritime-survey company Ocean Infinity arrived at a remote stretch of the Indian Ocean where the plane is believed to have crashed. It then deployed a trio of advanced robot subs three miles under the waves to scan the seabed using sonar waves. If successful, the effort will locate the wreckage of the aircraft together with the black boxes that will allow investigators to solve the mystery. If not, it will effectively disprove the analysis underlying the seabed search and suggest that officials bungled some fundamental assumptions.

The first underwater search for the missing plane was launched more than a decade ago, months after MH370 disappeared from air-traffic controllers’ screens on March 8, 2014, during a routine red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China. Scientists at the satellite-communications company Inmarsat later found that the plane had sent seven automatic radio signals before vanishing for good. In analyzing the data, scientists were able to extract a route from Malaysia into the southern Indian Ocean and concluded that the plane’s wreckage must lie near the end point of this path. Australia, which was responsible for finding the plane due to the search-and-rescue zone, hired a Dutch marine-survey company, Fugro, which dispatched a trio of ships to drag underwater sensors over the seabed. At first, officials were highly confident that they would locate the plane in short order, with one boasting that they had a 97 percent chance of success. But the plane was not in the search area measuring 46,000 square miles. Fugro increased the size of the search zone, then increased it again, without success. In 2017, the search was abandoned.

How Can a Plane Suddenly Nose-Dive?

This article originally ran in New York magazine on February 1, 2025.

On Friday night, northeast Philadelphia was rocked by the high-speed impact of a medevac jet that nose-dived into a busy avenue shortly after takeoff from North Philadelphia Airport. Having climbed to an altitude of 1,650 feet, the plane plummeted nearly vertically at more than 200 mph. Heavily loaded with fuel for a planned 1,000-mile flight to Springfield, Missouri, the plane exploded with the power of a cruise missile, incinerating cars and rattling neighborhood windows as it sent a fireball into the night sky. All six people aboard the plane were killed, as was at least one person on the ground, and at least 19 others were injured. It was the second horrific plane crash in the U.S. in as many days, following the collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night.

At time of writing, details of the Philadelphia accident are scarce. The plane was a Mexican-registered Learjet 55, a plane last produced in the 1980s. It was operated by a company called Jet Rescue Air Ambulance and was reportedly returning a young patient and her mother to Mexico after the child received treatment for a life-threatening condition at Shriners Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. In addition to the pilot and co-pilot, two medical personnel were also aboard the plane. In recent days, the plane hadtraveled frequently between Haiti, Mexico, and the United States. The company had suffered an earlier fatal crash in Morelos, Mexico, in 2023.

In the weeks ahead, accident investigators from the National Transport Safety Board will interview witnesses, collect and examine the wreckage, study maintenance records, and, if it is available, review data from the plane’s flight data recorder to understand what caused the crash and issue safety recommendations to prevent similar tragedies from recurring. As they assemble the evidence, investigators will be thinking about similar accidents that have happened in the past, looking for patterns to guide them in their search for the causal factors.

Here is a far-from-exhaustive list of some possibly relevant antecedents to Friday’s crash regarding why aircraft can nose-dive.

1. Pilot Disorientation

At the time of the crash, the weather in Philadelphia was overcast, with a cloud ceiling of 400 feet. That means that mere seconds after takeoff, the pilot flying the plane lost all visual reference to the ground, seeing out the window only shades of gray and black. Under so-called “instrument conditions,” the human brain is easily tricked into perceiving turns or acceleration as vertical motion and can easily become badly disoriented.

The D.C. Plane Crash Is No Mystery

A lot is unknown, but one basic fact is not: The helicopter pilot was at fault.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on January 31, 2025.

When air accidents happen, it’s important not to rush to judgment. Accurately determining the cause requires time and meticulous attention to detail, and though the process is laborious, it’s worth it because understanding what went wrong is the only way to prevent it from happening again.

That being said, in the wake of a crash, there are certain facts that quickly become evident, and there’s no benefit to imagining ambiguity where none exists.

In the case of the tragic midair collision that took place in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, there really is no great mystery as to which aircraft was at fault. It was quite clearly the Army Black Hawk helicopter that was not where it was supposed to be. While it may be the case that the tower was not properly staffed or that the airport’s resources are chronically overtaxed, neither of these things played a role in the crash that took the lives of 67 passengers and crew.

American Airlines Plane Crash Ends U.S. Aviation’s Safety Streak

Just at the same time Trump slashes the federal government.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on January 30, 2025.

While landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday shortly before 9 p.m., American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter and crashed into the icy Potomac River. The jet carried 64 passengers and crew, while the helicopter carried three soldiers. Authorities currently believe there were no survivors. The collision marks the first fatal crash of a U.S. carrier since 2009, when a Colgan Air regional jet crashed while landing in Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 aboard.

The American Airlines jet had departed from Wichita, Kansas, and was on a normal approach to Reagan’s runway 33, flying at an altitude of approximately 300 feet over the Potomac when it struck the helicopter, which was flying from north to south over the river. Shortly before the collision, air-traffic control asked the helicopter’s pilot if he had the airliner in sight, according to audio of the exchange posted to LiveATC.net. During a press conference on Thursday morning, officials said that they did not know why the helicopter had flown into the path of the jet, which was carrying American and Russian figure skaters.

Appearing at a press conference Thursday morning, the newly confirmed secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, insisted that both aircraft had been following standard routes. “This was not unusual,” Duffy said. “Everything was standard in the lead-up to the crash.”

However, route maps of the area published by the FAA for use by helicopter pilots show that helicopters are supposed to remain below 200 feet and hug the eastern shore of the Potomac. The last data point reported by the plane’s automatic position-reporting system showed it at an altitude of 275 feet and a quarter-mile from the eastern bank, suggesting that it was the Black Hawk that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A Private Jet Full of Vegas Revelers Never Made It Home. Would They Have Been Safer Flying Commercial?

Fancy fliers are creating a huge boom in private-jet travel, no longer the exclusive province of Fortune 500 companies, Donald Trump, or Taylor Swift. Yet for all the allure of flying private, it’s a rather dangerous luxury.

This article originally ran in Vanity Fair on January 29, 2025.

THEY CALLED HER Gypset. The name, a combination of gypsy and jet set, wasn’t one she’d come up with herself; she’d gotten it from the writer Julia Chaplin, who coined the term in her 2009 book, Gypset Style, to evoke the vibe of bright young things who waft from Sayulita to Tangier to Topanga Canyon, crafting eclectic necklaces and draping yurts with Hermès cashmere. Athletic and glamorously bohemian, with glacial blue eyes and a silver ring in her nose, Gypset embodied her nickname’s ideal, always flying off to go skiing or hang out backstage at a rock show.

Her given name was Lindsey Gleiche. She was 31 and lived in Huntington Beach, California, a short walk to the Pacific surf. Being a gypset is an occupation best suited for the independently wealthy, and Gleiche wasn’t that; she had a normal job, designing websites for Dollar General. But she was beautiful, friendly, and free-spirited.

In mid-2022, she met a man five years her junior, Riese Lenders, on a ski trip to Mammoth. Lenders was a pilot who was building his flight experience in Cessnas, turboprops, and small jets. He took her on jaunts to Las Vegas to see shows; to Arizona for her birthday; to the Bay Area for more music.

What It’s Like to Be a Waterbomber

Diving into burning canyons with Tanker 47

This story originally ran on January 16, 2025, in New York magazine.

Tanker 47 rears up as helicopter pilot Darren Davies settles it to hover over the Encino Reservoir, a half-mile-wide artificial lake perched on the shoulder of a hill overlooking the San Fernando Valley. He holds steady a dozen feet over the water as the flight mechanic in back, John Trivellin, lowers a 23-foot-long retractable snorkel into the reservoir.

“Tanker 47, we’re in the dip,” co-pilot Pablo Montero calls over the radio.

It’s 9.30 p.m. on Saturday, January 11, and the crew is on its third night working the Palisades fire, a Godzilla of a blaze that has already scorched more than 20,000 acres, killed five people, and annihilated more than 5,000 homes and other structures. The fire is less than 15 percent contained.

Davies’s infrared goggles turn the night into day, rendering the sprawling lights of the Valley below like a galaxy. In front sits a yellow rubber duck, a sort of mascot, jiggling atop the control panel from the vibrations of two massive sets of triple-rotor blades whirling overhead, each weighing 360 pounds. Radio frequencies for different fires are scrawled in black Sharpie on the inside of the windscreen in front of Montero, who handles most communications.

The Chinook is a beast, a 99-foot-long, 25-ton machine originally designed for humping troops and weapons around the battlefield, now repurposed for a different kind of war. It’s more than twice as big as the Black Hawk, its most famous cousin, and twice as long as a semi trailer when counting its 60-foot rotors. Inside Tanker 47’s cargo bay sits a 3,000-gallon tank, roughly equivalent to six hot tubs. While it’s not a vast amount in absolute terms, a helicopter can drop the water precisely, and all at once, which can halt the advance of even a large fire.

Within seconds, Davies can feel the aircraft grow heavier as the snorkel drinks from the reservoir and he throttles up the twin 5,000-horsepower turbine engines to compensate. In less than two minutes, the helicopter has taken on ten tons of water.