Nathan Fielder says FAA's pushback to 'The Rehearsal' claims is 'dumb'
Comedian Nathan Fielder took a swing at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Thursday over a statement in which the agency pushed back on claims from his HBO show, “The Rehearsal.”
During a recent episode of “The Rehearsal,” Fielder points to communication issues between an aircraft’s captain and first officer as appearing “to be the number one contributing factor to aviation crashes in history.”
Fielder addressed his claims in a Thursday interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room” with the outlet’s Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown, highlighted by Mediaite, and called the FAA's statement pushing back against his comments "dumb."
“We reached out to the FAA to see what it had to say about all of this, and it told us that it mandates all airline pilots and crew members to complete intrapersonal communication training, and it says it isn’t seeing the data that supports the show’s central claim that pilot communications is to blame for airline disasters. So, I want to get you to respond to that, obviously,” Brown told Fielder.
“That’s dumb,” Fielder responded. “They’re dumb, and they’re — you know — they, here’s the issue is that, they do — like I trained to be a pilot and I’m a [Boeing] 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.”
In a statement to The Hill that an FAA official described as “addressing” claims that Fielder made in the docuseries about aircraft crew communication, the FAA said that it “requires all airline crewmembers (pilots and flight attendants) and dispatchers to complete Crew Resource Management training.”
The FAA has described Crew Resource Management as “generally defined as the effective use of all available resources: human resources, hardware, and information”
The agency also said in the statement that it “analyzes data from a variety of sources such as an airline’s Safety Management System (SMS), Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP), and Voluntary Disclosure Reporting Program (VDRP).”
“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 FAA does not have data which supports these claims,” the agency added.
Fielder, who sported a 737 hat during the CNN interview, is known for his comedy that tends to push boundaries and takes big swings, with the last episode of “The Rehearsal” featuring the comedian training to fly a Boeing 737. A “Nathan Joseph Fielder” is listed in a FAA registry as a commercial pilot.
The Hill has reached out to the FAA about Fielder’s comments.