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One of the distinct pleasures of Nathan Fielder’s HBO show The Rehearsal is the way it blurs the line between taking something seriously and treating it as an absurd joke. Take, for instance, Fielder’s finale-defining piloting of a 737 full of actors over the American Southwest: Yes, the “Miracle Over The Mojave”—as Fielder insists we all call it—was a goofy, provocative stunt. But, well, he did actually fly and land the plane; the silly context of the act doesn’t obviate the fact that doing it was also genuinely impressive. See also the comedian’s ongoing disagreements with members of the House of Representatives over whether the communication issues highlighted in his show’s second season—in which co-pilots fail to speak up in critical moments, potentially causing crashes—deserve genuine attention.
This has apparently been irritating enough for House Democrats that Fielder’s questions seem, in a roundabout way, to have made it into a session of one of the Committees that oversee air travel in America, as the Twitter account for the members of the Committee On Transportation And Infrastructure posted a video clip in which Rep. Steve Cohen (who appeared in The Rehearsal, and isn’t necessarily happy about it) asks a veteran pilot about communication issues in the cockpit. (You could call it a coincidence, but the Twitter account addressed Fielder by name, claiming his questions have now been “asked and answered.”) Per Captain Jody Reven, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, commercial pilot training already takes the communication issues Fielder is focused on into account, and so no further work is needed to address issues in which co-pilots hesitate to take the controls, or captains resist suggestions from younger officers.
For his part, Fielder pushed back on this on social media, in a way that makes it clear that he maybe does actually care about this issue beyond its potential for creating bizarre jokes and perfect recreations of large chunks of a commercial airport. “I was going to call this dumb,” Fielder wrote on Twitter, referencing his recent verbal attack on the FAA. “But former NTSB board member John Goglia just texted me and told me to reply with this instead: The issue raised in The Rehearsal is whether the authority gradient affects copilots’ willingness to assert themselves at critical junctures and captains’ willingness to hear copilots in those moments. Neither the question nor the answer dealt with this well-recognized cockpit issue. Nor the NTSB’s analysis of the issue of what was lacking in current training and its recommendation of role-playing to ameliorate this situation.” Which is a pretty neat encapsulation of one of the big points of The Rehearsal: That saving lives might be as simple (and cheap) as mildly changing perspectives, and potentially opening some people up to looking silly—if the people in charge were willing to try instead of simply dismissing it.
