Nathan Fielder rejected a statement from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on CNN on Thursday about flight safety. “That’s dumb,” he said. “They’re dumb.”
The premise for the second season of his HBO series The Rehearsal is that poor communication between copilots and airplane captains leads to crashes. The season finale ended with Fielder becoming a pilot and flying 150 people on a 737.
Fielder told CNN he became interested in how plane crashes occur just as a hobby (“I don’t want to die,” he said) and from watching a Canadian TV show about plane crashes. “I started to notice that they can always solve the technical stuff when a crash happens, you know, they work really hard to make sure that type of accident doesn’t happen again,” he said. “But for the human factor in communication, the thing keeps happening where there’s miscommunication between pilots.”
The six-episode season demonstrates how Fielder believes crashes happen. The FAA responded to Fielder’s findings in a statement to CNN. The administration said it “mandates all airline pilots and crew members to complete interpersonal communication training” and it “isn’t seeing the data that supports the show’s central claim that pilot communications is to blame for airline disasters.”
“The Federal Aviation Administration requires all crewmembers (pilots and flight attendants) and dispatchers to complete Crew Resource Management training,” the administration told CNN. “They must complete this training before they begin working in their official positions and complete it on a recurring basis afterward.”
Fielder responded by calling them dumb. “Here’s the issue: I trained to be a pilot,” he said. “I’m a 737 pilot. I went through the training. The training is, someone shows you a PowerPoint slide saying, ‘If you are a copilot and the captain does something wrong, you need to speak up about it.’ That’s all. That’s the training. And they talk about some crashes that happen, but they don’t do anything that makes it stick emotionally.”
The comedian recently told Rolling Stone he had no interest in becoming a pilot before embarking on the show. “I was insecure of the fact that I am just a comedian, and no one will think I’m trying to explore this in a real way,” he said. “And so I wanted to be able to talk to pilots and say, “Hey, I’m a pilot, too.” And I could actually talk and understand their experiences in ways that an outsider couldn’t. It was so scary for me to do that. But the second I showed up and started interacting with people I started to see the way communication happens and I’m like, ‘This is happening all the time.’”
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
From Rolling Stone US
