“At the beginning of making the series, I was looking at when they were first inventing the plane. And truly, if you look at the articles around that time, everyone’s like, ‘This is just comedy. This is not a serious thing. We can’t create a flying machine. This is goofy.’ But obviously, as it became normal, it’s not a funny thing anymore.”
Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO
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.
But then again: Really? Trying to figure out what’s sincere and what’s a Kaufmanesque put-on in season two of The Rehearsal can leave you feeling like you’re tripping down an M.C. Escher staircase. Fortunately, I was able to clarify matters during a two-hour conversation with Fielder last week, during which he came clean about his fascination with aviation and how he was able to find comedy in the not very funny specter of smoking wreckage. Offscreen, Fielder is personable, low-key, vulnerable, and generous. He was eager to get into the weeds of plane geekery with me, a longtime aviation journalist, and to describe the winding path of his aviation journey, which started with a decadeslong obsession with a Canadian plane-crash show and which will lead, in the best-case scenario, to Fielder testifying before Congress to usher in new safety legislation. He’s even workshopped a new joke he can use to break the ice with lawmakers.
Thank you for taking the time. This is an incredible show. I wrote a story about it already. I don’t know if you had a chance to look at it.
Yeah, I did!
To start off, is there anything that you would say I got wrong?
Well, I mean, you reported on it and you talked to people, so it’s all relevant. I don’t know everything, you know? What I will say is the version of the issue we bring up in the show is on the aviation industry’s radar in some way; they understand this miscommunication happens. And obviously in the ’70s, that’s when CRM (crew-resource management) was developed as a solution for it or as a technique to solve it. But because the training is often just a PowerPoint presentation for 20 minutes, it’s almost like bad training is worse than no training at all. I started to realize that a lot of people feel it’s not an issue — No. 1, because it hasn’t happened to them specifically, because they’re still alive; and No. 2, they’re like, I received training for that, so they think, in a scenario like the ones depicted in the show, they would act in a certain way.
But from all the research I’ve done, and going through the process of becoming a 737 pilot myself, my sense is that a lot of people wouldn’t act like they think they would in those circumstances and also that it happens in ways that are a lot more common than people think. I think this doesn’t always lead to crashes, but if the elements line up, it would. And people are lucky because it’s very rare that a crash happens because of one problem. It’s a coincidence of several things all together. And if one of those elements, a chain of events …
Swiss cheese.
What’d you say?
They call it the Swiss-cheese model: All the holes in the cheese have to line up for the accident to occur.
Okay, I haven’t heard that. I like that. Swiss cheese. I’m going to use that to describe things in the future in my life.
But to your point, this is why simulators exist, really: If you haven’t encountered it before, if you don’t have the muscle memory, it takes a minute to conceptually process that this is that thing that you read about, by which point it’s too late. And if you have to process, Oh, I don’t feel comfortable with this guy, I’m not communicating with him, this thing is happening … I think that’s what you’re saying, right? It’s that unless you experience it for real, it’ll take too long.
And every single pilot who flies a two-pilot plane has definitely had moments where they may not have expressed something or been as forceful they want, or they withheld things, or there’s social disconnect in the cockpit, but it didn’t line up with other elements that led to a crash. So they write it off as, Yeah, I guess it just wasn’t worth bringing up, and you can justify that to yourself with, In a situation where it was more critical, I would act differently. But I just don’t know if that’s the case.
I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re going to do something, especially creatively, you need to have one goal and then focus all of your efforts toward achieving that one thing, and anything else you get along the way is gravy. But I feel like with this project, you set out with two kinds of directly orthogonal goals. You have one, which you address …
Orthogonal? What is orthogonal?
Like a 90-degree angle. It’s like this (gestures with hands).
Oooh. So they’re not parallel.
They’re not parallel. They’re not against each other, but they’re not in any way directly helping each other, by which I mean …
… Orthogonal?
Yeah.
It sounds like orthotic, like shoe orthotic.
Orthopedic? (Laughs.)
… “Orthogonal goals.”
On the one hand, you’re trying to make a comedy show that HBO and your audience will find delightful. On the other hand — this is the orthogonal part — you want to make a show that seriously, potentially, moves the needle on a real safety issue, which isn’t funny at all. I mean, in the first episode, you’re standing over dead bodies. That’s not funny in itself. And yet this is your starting point; this is the kind of the armature that the whole enterprise hangs from. When you first set out to make this season, did you consciously have two separate goals in mind?
Well, sometimes I like putting myself in a situation where I have to genuinely dig myself out of a hole and I don’t really know how to. And something like this would be a challenge for me, because people don’t want to take me seriously in any way. It would be an actual challenge if I have to try to somewhat convey these ideas in a real way but, at the same time, entertain. I thought that would lead to an interesting tone that was new that we haven’t done yet.
The stakes are real, and I think maybe that adds some dramatic tension.
Yeah, and I sort of express it as I go along. Because these are real people who died in those crashes we’re reenacting in the opening of the show. And as it goes on, my insecurity comes in that this isn’t funny enough. You’re an aviation reporter, so you’re probably very comfortable just talking seriously, constantly, in everything you put out, without a joke, ever. But my body doesn’t operate that way. After enough time of not having something funny happen, I start to be like, We need something funny to happen.
Right.
Which is a counterproductive tendency, but it is a real tendency. So I feel like I have this weird way of undercutting myself because I want it to be funny. But there’s also a world where the funnier something is, the more the ideas will come across to people.
So anyways. I don’t know. Orthological. What’s the word?
Now I’m blanking on it. Anyway, so if somebody in Congress — and this is very likely, actually — watches the show and says, “Yeah, I get it. Let’s set up a committee hearing for real,” would you go?
Yes, I’m in. For sure!
Would you tell a different joke than the one you told in the congressional-hearing rehearsal?
I do think the joke is funny because it feels like a joke, so people might pay attention and I might get some chuckles. There was another joke I had thought of recently that is … (Pauses.) Actually no, I can’t take this. Someone else thought of the joke. I was on a plane recently, and the flight attendant was like, “What do you do?” And I said, “I’m a comedian.” And she said, “Say something funny.” I didn’t have anything funny in the moment, so I said, “Give me like ten minutes and then come back.” I was brainstorming with the person I was with, so I’m not going to take credit, but the person I was with came up with, “What’s a pilot’s favorite bagel?”
I give up.
Plane.
(Laughs) That’s pretty good.
I think it’s good, right? I think it’s original. I don’t want it to be canned. That could be a great joke to do there because it’s a little more family-friendly. But I also do feel like sometimes a softer joke is too corny. So anyways, these are the things I debate, but I understand that saying “masturbating” … I don’t know, is that that bad of a word? I can’t tell.
The real joke, the payoff, of that scene is your reaction to the actors laughing really, really ridiculously.
Well, that’s the thing. The challenge of these rehearsals is that actors are used to getting a script; they’re used to getting some sort of direction. But when you’re in a situation where it’s open-ended, people don’t know what they’re supposed to do without direction. That’s always a fun challenge of the show — these obstacles of How do you create realism in this fake world?
John Goglia with Fielder in the season finale.
Photo: John P. Johnson / HBO
Right, right. So to get back to the Congress question: Would you ask for the same thing you asked for in a show, or would you ask for something a little different?
John Goglia, who I’ve been working with for the show and who I still talk to all the time, his big thing is getting funding to research this issue more and these sorts of solutions. I know people might be inclined to write off the things we concluded in the show, and some of the solutions, because it seems so goofy. I don’t know if we conveyed this properly, but I actually think that what’s funny about it, and it being sort of lame, is a benefit. Because if people are forced to do something by the FAA that they think is lame and goofy, it actually forces the two people to bond over that. At the beginning of making the series, I was looking at when they were first inventing the plane. And truly, if you look at the articles around that time, everyone’s like, “This is just comedy. This is not a serious thing. We can’t create a flying machine. This is goofy.” But obviously, as it became normal, it’s not a funny thing anymore.
I was just in Japan, and they have all these systems in place that I was fascinated by that seem to accommodate these areas of what a human needs — fulfillment and connection — that don’t feel like, Oh, this is a normal thing. I guess the men there feel beaten down at work, so there are these places they can go where someone will act like “Oh, you are the best!” and “I think you’re amazing!” And they’ll laugh at all their jokes. Or young women who are from the rural areas come to Tokyo, and there are these cafés they can go to where someone will act like a big sister and give them advice on how to live in the city, or meet boys, or whatever they want to do. And these things look funny when you look at them from the outside, but I do think these are solving an internal thing that people in society need.
Do I sound like a lunatic?
Not at all. Before writing my piece about your show, I’d heard about CRM, but I hadn’t read a ton about it, and I hadn’t heard about “safety voice” at all. It’s a very small field. One of the people I reached out to was Kimberly Perkins. She’s a 787 pilot. She also has a Ph.D. in human-factors research. She’s doing a research study into pilot-emotional health, which is another aspect of your show. She has a survey going with 1,700 pilots and air-traffic controllers and counting; it’s an ongoing study. One of the questions she asks in it is, “To what extent do you agree with the following statement: ‘I avoid using mental-health tools or seeking assistance because I worry it could negatively affect my job or career.’” 67 percent agreed.
Oh my God, it’s more than that. I mean, 67 percent agreed openly, but …
But I think it’s interesting — the thing that you’re talking about in your show is something that someone is actually collecting data on as we speak.
Yeah, wow. I mean, truly, the pilots that we talked to, everyone was like, “This is a real thing.” But I think all those things may seem disparate in the way we lay it out, but the idea of not being able to talk about how you feel because you might be seen as someone who might be having emotional problems connects to communication about everything. Because no one wants to seem to another person like their judgment is off, or like they might be stressed about something they shouldn’t be stressed about, because that might imply things.
I mean, it’s a separate issue from the cockpit-communications issue — related but separate.
Well, it’s not fully separate in a larger context, because it’s about pilots being seen as human beings and understanding that humans have these challenges that need to be dealt with in maybe imaginative and unique ways. The pressure that’s on a pilot to be perfect and to seem perfect is immense.
One of the reasons why I thought this would be interesting to do for this season is because no one wants to think that their pilot is weird, even in the slightest. You’ll choose to convince yourself it’s not happening if you even witness something that you may think is weird because your life is in their hands. And I think pilots sense that. Even since becoming a pilot myself, and with what we were trying to do in the show, I started to feel like, I don’t want to make too many jokes about anything we’re doing here because I need everyone to understand that I am taking the safety of everything very seriously. So I felt it changing how I was acting around people because of that responsibility you have of other people’s lives.
I’ve been really interested in commercial-aviation crashes for almost 20 years, and the thing that I found so fascinating was that, when a crash happens, the investigation that’s done after is so thorough. I just thought, How could you find things when planes just disintegrate? How could you possibly know what happened? How could you find the mechanical issue? But they spend years and years scouring every millimeter of land everywhere around. They find every piece of that plane. And almost always, they can determine what caused it. Then they make serious changes worldwide to the industry to make sure that specific type of crash doesn’t happen again. And it’s effective; it really works. You can track aviation history, and you see this type of thing no longer happens anymore after a certain crash.
But the one thing that I started to notice that they could never solve that keeps happening is the human element, and the communication thing kept coming up. When CRM was introduced, that was a big thing that helped with communication, but it still is happening in all these subtle ways. It gets sidelined in the investigations because there are other factors too that cause the crash. And because it’s not the sole cause, it often gets a reaction like, Well, we can only do so much about that. And in the show, I think we’re sort of being like, Well, what if you can do more?
This leads to the really uncanny thing, which is that you made this show, it’s in the can, it’s scheduled to run. And then this accident happens in D.C. with the midair. And the report isn’t out yet, but you potentially have a miscommunication in the cockpit of the Black Hawk, where the instructor pilot tells the pilot flying, “You’re out of your lane.” She doesn’t do anything. The collision happens. There hadn’t been a fatal commercial air crash in 16 years and then this happens after your show is scheduled to air. I mean, it’s really validating, but it’s kind of eerie too.
It’s really eerie, but I also wasn’t surprised. To me, I’m actually surprised that there haven’t been more big crashes. It’s easy to look at it when the crash happens and be like, Well, this is just an outlier, or This person is not a good pilot, or something, but it doesn’t matter how many years of experience some people have; you’re putting two people together who have never met, time and time again, where their communication could make the difference.
I don’t know if people know this, but there are no cameras allowed in a cockpit. So as a starting point, all they have to analyze is verbal communication. Most people know that most communication, or at least a ton of it, is nonverbal. So you’re not seeing faces, and if you listen to cockpit audio and analyze it, most of it is silences, and you’re trying to figure out what’s going on. So someone might say a word, but then a lot can be communicated with looks, with expressions. And that’s not part of accident analysis.
Do you think there should be cameras in cockpits?
I understand that there are privacy issues with that. But another thing with cockpit audio is that if the plane doesn’t crash, the audio is deleted, so no one is analyzing flights where communication might be bad but an accident doesn’t happen. But that type of miscommunication — “You’re out of your lane,” and the person doesn’t necessarily respond right away — maybe happens 5,000 times every day? I don’t know. So maybe that’s an area to look at. The pilots unions might have an issue with it, obviously, but these are lives on the line, right? Why not just take a random sampling of a hundred flights a day and see how communication is? And pilots won’t know which — you randomize it or something.
There are a lot of ways to go about it, but something as small as making people do a little acting thing — I don’t know, would that make communication worse? Something where people are forced to discuss it, and even if they choose not to do it, they have to be like, “I’m not doing that thing because we’re good on this,” so they have to have a conversation about it anyways?
Right. Even if to deny it.
Even if to deny it, they have to acknowledge that they don’t need it. Look, I’m just saying maybe it’s like the first planes out there where it’s like, Yeah, it looks silly, but actually put it into action. What’s wrong with laughing with each other for a moment? Why is there such a stigma around laughing?
That’s a great point.
I’m not saying, “Hey, this is the No. 1 way to do it,” but I’m saying, “Why not try out things? Why not research some stuff?”
As you watch your show, you’re always having to negotiate Is he serious at this point or is he joking? So I just want to clarify to people that, no — even though it’s a silly recommendation, it’s a serious recommendation, in that by taking on these silly personas, we can overcome a real potential communications problem. It’s something you would really propose.
And with the acting idea, we were also sort of saying that you can have an excuse of, like, “Yeah, well, they told me to act this way, as this character,” so you can get out of an awkward social thing by doing that. It might not be the only way to do it, but if people are criticizing that, I haven’t seen a better answer. There’s a sweet spot of what we’re trying to go for in the show of What’s the middle ground of something that is real but also something that is funny and entertaining? I felt like that was interesting because it is funny and sounds funny, but there might actually be some effectiveness to it. I think you see in the final episode that we weren’t communicating well in the cockpit and that did sort of bring my co-pilot out of his shell a little.
Well, I want to talk about the finale, because it did make my jaw hit the ground. I was feeling pretty smug when you took 150 hours to solo, but then you reveal you’ve got a multi-engine rating, you’ve got a commercial rating, and then you’re flying a freaking 737. It’s impressive in itself to get the hours to get a full commercial-pilot rating, but you’re also making hit TV shows at the same time. Can you talk a little about your aviation journey — what got you into it, and how long it’s taken you to get here?
I had never had a desire to be a pilot, ever. It’s totally scary to me. You also realize when you do start flying that a lot of people who get into this are people who love cars, and they ride motorcycles, and they know all about engines. I didn’t know any of that stuff. I didn’t even know what an engine was, really. I knew it produced power, but I didn’t even understand what the “power” is. I put oil in my car, but I didn’t know why I needed that, really. I’m, like, so dumb with all of this stuff, but I realized I had to learn all of that. So when I had this idea of this recurring issue of the communication between the two pilots and how it leads to a lot of crashes, I was like, I only know about aviation from what I’ve read, but I really want to understand what it actually feels like to be a pilot.
But why were you reading accident reports?
Well, there’s a show in Canada that re-created aviation disasters and talked about the solutions …
Mayday?
Mayday, yeah. You know that show?
I’ve been on it.
So I’ve probably seen you on that show! Anyway, I love Mayday. That’s how I started to notice the trend of, Wow, this thing keeps sort of coming up, but they don’t address it as the main thing. Then I started looking at other stuff and bought books on it. But I never thought about it as something for a show. I’d be walking around for years just telling people, “Did you know that this is the main cause of a lot of crashes?” And people would be like, “No, I had no idea.” So then something clicked when I was trying to think about doing more of The Rehearsal, and the idea of pilots feeling they need to be perfect felt relevant to what the show was — the contradiction of them being human but them also needing to actually be perfect. It seemed like it’d be an interesting area to explore — to maybe go into their lives out of the cockpit and see if there are analogies there with the communications stuff in their personal relationships.
That was my starting point. And then, going back to what you were saying about being a comedian, I was immediately insecure that I’d be able to do this because my fear would be that pilots would think this is only a joke or that they’re being made fun of in some way. Not only did I want to understand the experience of being a pilot, but I thought that being a pilot would disarm some of them in a conversation; I could be like, “I’m a pilot too, and here’s my experience, and I do understand some of these things.” I actually talked throughout the season to most of the pilots, and we’d talk as pilots more as it went on. But in the edit, we ended up deciding that delaying that idea until the end was a better storytelling device.
So in the last episode, we say “Two Years Earlier” because I actually did start that at the very beginning of the process. Basically, around January 2023, I had this idea, and before I even talked to HBO about the concept, I started doing some flight training. Then a couple months in I was like, “Here’s the idea.” I was filming it, so I showed them some footage of me doing it. It’s interesting, because I am trying my best; I’m truly, truly just trying my best to do this in as quick of a time as possible, and I was struggling! It’s crazy what pilots have to go through. It’s really hard. And the knowledge stuff you have to complete — which we don’t even get into in the show — is so immense to get these licenses.
“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”
Photo: John P. Johnson / HBO
Did you feel like you needed to reach a certain point with your flying career in order for the project to be what it needed to be?
I set a goal in my head of getting private pilot, instrument, and commercial. I liked the sound of that — “commercial.” It sounds impressive, even though a lot of people don’t know that “commercial pilot” doesn’t mean you can fly a big plane; it just means you can be paid to fly.
It’s still a big deal.
It’s more about hours-building, and you do have to do some tough maneuvers that are really hard. It became my primary focus for a while in the early stages of making the show. But it was hard because we’d be going and doing other shoots and then I’d be going and doing training. (Laughs) It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
And at some point you’re like, I could actually fly a 737, but you had to be very clever about it and you kind of had to know the loopholes, as it were.
Yeah, I learned about that when I was doing my commercial-pilot license. A lot of the knowledge-based stuff about your commercial-pilot license is related to for-hire and the rules around that. It just goes to show that you have to do it and be there to understand what the culture is around flying and what is acceptable and what isn’t.
But this was a thing that everyone said was not possible — when I initially had the idea of flying a 737. I was like, “Well, these rules technically say you can.” But then there’s all these other stakeholders in the process of big-planes flying, and separate rules that navigate them that you have to really do your diligence on.
At the beginning of the season, you start looking at pilots in airports. You don’t know what’s behind the door of the pilots’ lounge. Then at the end, you’re one of them. So by the end, did you see the communications problem the same way as when you set out to solve it?
No, not at all. It was like I was viewing it from a distance. Once I really got into the flying thing, I was like, I can’t imagine a flight where there isn’t some sort of at least minor social disconnect.
So it only reinforced your belief.
Yeah. It’s just that you’re not in danger most of the time, but the social thing is there.
A couple months ago, there were some Redditors who found your name in the FAA database with a 737-type rating, and they flipped out. Did you know that you had been rumbled, and were you worried it would get spoiled?
Rumbled? What’s that mean?
It means that you had a secret, and they figured out your secret.
I knew the FAA registry was public, so I was like, Well, if I do this, I know people might look into this. People who clearly knew me or the show saw me when I was doing my flight training. So I get it, but what can I do? If people did know and didn’t spoil it, then thank you for that. Some people out there probably like things spoiled for themselves or to know what’s going to happen. I don’t like that personally for myself, but the show doesn’t live or die based on things being out there in the world or not.
One of the people I talked to for my piece about the show was Mark Noort, who’s done experiments on safety voice. He was really interested to know about the extent to which you were doing, essentially, psychology experiments. And in an academic setting, you would have to get what’s called an internal-review board to sign off on the experiment. So he was interested in talking about the ethical issues of doing experiments with people. Is that something that you had consultants on?
Well, I guess it’s the beauty of not being, like, a professor. I’m not a psychologist — I make television, so I am going on my instincts and my hunches. With the show overall, we really try to seek out people who are looking for an experience outside of their day-to-day life. Those are the people who are going to thrive in the environment of the show. And also, it’s important to us that, even if it was a weird experience, we want everyone to be happy they were a part of it; it’s going to be a great story for the rest of their life. A lot of people really want to know everything — very controlling personality types — and they’re likely to get upset. We’ve made that mistake in the past, so we try to avoid those types and get people who are looking for something kind of interesting and creative to be a part of.
I think there’s actually a real opportunity to work outside of this professional psychological field. I wrote a book about fear, and I did a lot of research into the experiments that the Air Force did into fear. They would do all kinds of stuff you could never get past the review board today. They would put draftees on an airplane and have them fill out a form that was deliberately written in a really confusing way and then they would turn off one of the engines and say, “Here’s this insurance form that you have to fill out in case the plane crashes and you die.” And that was a kind of test.
Maybe academics out there can contact me and be like, “Hey, I have these things I want to do, but my board won’t let me because they’re too unethical. Can you do them for me?”
Would you consider that?
Sure, why not? If it helps the world, right?
One of my colleagues at Vulture asked Amy Lee from Evanescence what she thought The Rehearsal is fundamentally about. Did you read the interview?
Oh yes! I’m so glad she liked the show. (Laughs.)
One thing she said really struck me: “It’s almost like a battle against anxiety, because anxiety comes from not knowing what’s going to happen and a fear of what could happen.”
Yeah, I think that’s a good take.
“The sim cannot capture the feeling of If anything goes wrong, I’m going to die.”
I was thinking about how anyone who’s ever performed anything on a stage is familiar with being backstage, feeling anxious, and having all kinds of catastrophic scenarios playing out in their minds. Then the curtain goes up and the anxiety goes away. In the finale, you’re not rehearsing. You’re there in the cockpit, you’re literally in the sky, and you’ve escaped from thinking into doing. What’s your mind like when you’re flying?
The thing I’ve noticed is my mind wanders all the time in life, but when I’m flying, I am hyperfocused, because I know what the stakes are, so I am really present in that moment. It’s interesting because it’s not something that I’m like for a large part of my life, so it does do something to you.
You’ve got your private-pilot license, and to do the next levels of licenses — commercial, ATP — you have to build hours. So you’re here in your plane, flying around all by yourself for hundreds and hundreds of hours — years basically — to get to that 1,500 hours, which is what you need to work at the airlines. There’s something that I started to realize about that, too, when I was doing it, where it’s like, Wow, this is just time where you are not flying with another person, you’re not learning the skills of interaction, and then suddenly you’re put in an airline plane with passengers and you have to communicate. That’s another aspect of the way pilots are trained, where the socialization aspect of it is not forefront in that. The building hours all alone is actually, potentially, working against the communication part of flying. It’s like if you sat in your room for several years and then you had to go on a date — how’s that date going to go right away? Except there’s passengers in the back right away.
That’s the thing that I didn’t even know, too: Of course airlines don’t have the money to train pilots on flying around in empty planes because the fuel is so expensive. So everything’s just in this sim. And the sim is close, but it’s not exact, I’ll tell you that. It is not exact. So it’s interesting. The sim cannot capture the feeling of If anything goes wrong, I’m going to die.
Do you still fly the same amount?
Not the same amount. But yeah, I’m still doing some of the flying those empty planes around when I can.
Do you get a text, and it’s like, “Hey, can you be in Calcutta in 18 hours?” or something?
Sort of, and I can’t do all these jobs, but they’ll be like “Hey, can you be in China on this date? We have a 737 moving across several countries.”
Now that you’ve got the ability to do all these things with aviation, what do you want to do?
Can I just say something in case anyone who is a pilot or is interested in being a pilot ends up reading this? Have you heard of this book, The Killing Zone?
No.
So the theory of The Killing Zone is that during the pilot-training process, the most deaths occur between 50 hours and 350 hours. This book lays out all these things you need to remember and look out for. They are the most common ways early pilots die in crashes, and it’s really helpful to know. I feel like that book should be mandatory for pilots to read because it’s not the stuff you think about, and it’s not something you necessarily go over in the training.
What’s one of the points that it makes?
Well, I think, related to clouds is a big thing. One of the main killers is people misjudging. When you’re a private pilot, you’re not allowed to fly near clouds or in clouds. You need to have clear visibility. So a lot of times, people will accidentally fly into a cloud and lose their sense of up and down. It’s called VFR into IMC. And the book tells you a very simple trick where, if you fly into a cloud, just don’t panic. Pull a 180, and just go right out the other way, rather than trying to hope you’ll come out.
As someone who’s caught the bug of flying, do you just want to keep doing these delivery flights? Do you want to get a glider rating?
The small planes are kind of scary to me. I don’t know. It’s sort of like … I used to do stand-up comedy, and when I was going multiple times a week, it was way less stressful. But when you take big breaks, it starts to become daunting. I think that’s the same with flying, where you have to do it all the time constantly. And switching types of planes a lot is something that’s not recommended, I think. But I don’t know. Maybe with the small-plane stuff I’ll get back into it at some point. I don’t know though … If you read The Killing Zone … (Laughs.)
Yeah, I’ll read it! Has the book turned you off to that? Is the risk too high?
I think the risk is higher on the smaller planes, right? I mean, it is scary, but I’ve never really had a desire to do it with the small plane. Besides the fact that I was doing it for the show to learn and understand, the big planes have always been fascinating to me. If you look at an Airbus A380 or something, and you see this massive plane in the sky, it looks like a joke. It looks funny, because you’re like, That thing shouldn’t fly. So when a plane crash happens, you’re like, Well, of course. We’re flying 500 people in the sky right now in that tube. Something about it feels so goofy, doesn’t it?
