Comedian/pilot Nathan Fielder criticized the Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday, calling the agency "dumb" for its response to his show "The Rehearsal."
Wearing a hat that read "737" (yes, like the plane) and a suit, Fielder and aviation safety expert John Goglia joined CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown to discuss the reaction to his HBO show. (CNN and HBO are both owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.)
In the second season of the docu-comedy, which aired its finale on Sunday, Fielder investigates a theory that suggests many plane crashes are caused by pilots and co-pilots miscommunicating with each other. Viewers learn that Fielder had spent two years obtaining his commercial pilot license, so that he could fly a full plane of passengers (all actors) on a Boeing 737. While Fielder is known on the show to make fake scenarios look realistic, viewers were shocked to realize he was, in fact, flying the plane. Some fans on Reddit also said they found Fielder in the FAA database and looked up his flight.
Goglia, a former National Transportation Safety Board member, also appears on “The Rehearsal" and provided Fielder with expertise on flying. Together, they advocated for including role playing in pilot training.
During the CNN segment, Brown read a statement from the FAA, in which a spokesperson said the agency “requires all airline crewmembers (pilots and flight attendants) and dispatchers to complete Crew Resource Management training. They must complete this training before they begin working in their official positions and complete it on a recurring basis afterward.”
Brown said the agency also told CNN that it isn’t seeing the data that supports the show's "claim that pilot communications is to blame for airline disasters."
“That’s dumb. They’re dumb,” Fielder said of the FAA after Brown read the statement. “Here’s the issue: I trained to be a pilot. I’m a 737 pilot. I went through the training. The training is someone shows you a PowerPoint slide saying, ‘If you are a co-pilot 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.”
A spokesperson for the FAA sent NBC News the statement Brown read on air and added that "the Federal Aviation Administration analyzes data from a variety of sources such as an airline's Safety Management System, Aviation Safety Action Program, and Voluntary Disclosure Reporting Program."
"If these programs identify elevated risks, appropriate action is taken by both the airline and the FAA to mitigate the risk and ensure safety," the spokesperson said.
The agency declined to comment further.
Fielder's interview, like his show, quickly gained traction online, with many viewers praising him for committing to the bit.
The comedian is known for his socially awkward humor, which is on full display in "The Rehearsal." The show has drawn both praise (with some calling Fielder a comedic genius) as well as criticism (with others claiming he can sometimes take things too far).
In another episode from season two, for example, the comedian depicts Paramount+ as Nazis after the streamer removed an episode of his show "Nathan for You" from its platform due to "sensitivities" around antisemitism, according to Variety. The show, which debuted in 2013, ran for four seasons on Paramount's Comedy Central.
For Fielder, “The Rehearsal" "is still comedy, but also this is a serious thing,” he told CNN. “But I’ve been just interested in commercial airline crashes just for a while, as a hobby, I just read about them.”
When asked if he’s concerned about airline safety, Fielder said, “Well, I don’t want to die. I mean I’m concerned the same as everyone.”
He said he was interested in exploring the topic of aviation safety when he started to notice that “they can always solve the technical stuff when a crash happens, they work really hard to make sure that type of accident doesn’t happen again. But for the human factor — communication — the thing keeps happening where there’s miscommunication between pilots.”
