In the Season 2 finale of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, the comedian examines flaws in commercial airline safety due to co-pilots being afraid to speak up to their superiors. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has since pushed back against his findings in a statement pointing to required training for all airline crewmembers, but Fielder isn’t buying it.
“The Federal Aviation Administration requires all airline crewmembers (pilots and flight attendants) and dispatchers to complete Crew Resource Management training,” reads the FAA’s statement to CNN. The government agency also said it wasn’t seeing data to support Fielder’s claim about communication issues leading to airplane accidents.
While appearing on the news network to discuss the series, Fielder cited his own experience of getting licensed to fly a commercial 737 jet to respond, “That’s dumb. They’re dumb.”
Related Video
He continued, “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.”
Watch the segment below.
As shown in The Rehearsal, Fielder spent a month in Henderson, Nevada training to become “the least-experienced person licensed to fly a 737 in North America.” This experience allowed him to explore safe communication in the cockpit after the show hypothesized that multiple accidents have resulted from co-pilots being afraid to speak up to captains with their concerns.
After a series of social simulations, Fielder successfully flew a real-life 737 full of “passengers” (paid actors) for over two hours and landed it successfully. Read our review of the finale here.
Content shared from consequence.net.