Aviation Expert Backs Up Nathan Fielder’s Insane Plan to Fix Airline Safety

This article contains spoilers for the Season Two premiere of The Rehearsal.

Nathan Fielder has ripped off Starbucks, swapped lives with a complete stranger and possibly psychologically scarred a small child (but hopefully not). Now, in Season Two of The Rehearsal, he is purportedly endeavoring to fix America’s aviation safety problems using his talent for “creating elaborate role-playing scenarios.”

That’s because real-life incidents in which first officers didn’t speak up when captains made dangerous decisions led the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to recommend more simulations to help reinforce assertiveness amongst co-pilots. Of course, this show may not exactly be what they had in mind.

In Sunday’s season premiere, Fielder shadows an airline first officer named Moody, a process that involves following him to the airport and listening in on phone calls with his long-distance girlfriend while sprawled across his bed. 

Fielder eventually decides that the best way to instill assertiveness in Moody is to get him to better “feel the emotional connection” during flights, as Fielder notes in his voiceover, “for the sake of the flying public, holding stuff in is never the answer.”

So naturally, Fielder opts to dress Moody’s girlfriend up like an airline captain, then has him confront her about his relationship insecurities, specifically, his fear that she will leave him for a customer at the Starbucks where she works. The plan doesn’t work. Things just get awkward, and Fielder realizes that pilots “can’t be distracted by their feelings” during flights. 

But Fielder’s methods (not to be confused with “The Fielder Method”) aren’t as crazy as they might seem, at least not according to NTSB member John Goglia, the aviation expert who Fielder consults with at the beginning of The Rehearsal. 

Goglia recently spoke to The Cut, and admitted that he actually came around to Fielder’s way of thinking during their conversation. “In those first 10 minutes or so, I didn’t see much of a connection between accidents and what he was proposing,” Goglia explained. “But he said he’d seen the problem with actors, where someone famous is playing opposite somebody who’s an up-and-comer. And he articulated it very well. Then I morphed over to realizing, based upon all my interfaces with pilots, that I had seen some of that.” 

While Goglia wasn’t aware of Fielder’s work prior to the shoot, after watching the episode, he was impressed by “the part with the pilot and his girlfriend,” adding “I think (Fielder’s) onto something.”

Even though the show itself illustrated that having a conversation about petty jealousy with a girlfriend may not be comparable to flying an airplane, Goglia stressed that strengthening communication skills with a romantic partner could still benefit cockpit interactions. “I think they’re related,” Goglia argued. “I was the young guy, and I wanted to fly, and I went out and soloed. And now what am I going to do for the next 1,500 hours, which equates to a whole year’s worth of work? I’m sitting alone in a cockpit for 90-plus percent of that time. You become introverted if you weren’t already. We have that with the younger generation heads down into their phones. They don’t have the social skills that maybe earlier generations had.”

While it remains to be seen whether or not The Rehearsal will help Moody’s airline career, it’s definitely boosted his “selling Cameo videos for boyfriends who are worried their girlfriends will cheat on them with Starbucks customers” career.