Nathan Fielder on Instagram
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Nathan Fielder’s beef with the United States Government continues as the comedian and licensed 737 pilot pushes for the FAA to improve cockpit communication. In season two of his acclaimed HBO series The Rehearsal, Fielder’s research found a correlation between airline accidents and poor cockpit communication between pilots and co-pilots.
In one episode of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder heads to Washington D.C. to speak with Congressman Steve Cohen, who represents Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District and is the “ranking member” of the House of Representative’s Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation.
Earlier this week, the official Twitter account for the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure tweeted a video of Rep. Cohen — with the caption “Nathan Fielder’s question has been asked and answered!” — asking Captain Jody Reven, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association,
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.”) if he sees any problem in “the relationship of pilots and co-pilots and guiding an airplane safely, or any interactions that you find to be difficult.”
“So I think we deal with three or four generations sometimes, and a seniority list, and we work through those issues, we’re trained very well, we have yearly discussions about that,” Reven begins.
“Cockpit resource management is of the utmost … we have professional aviators out there that — the Midway incident is a great teamwork type of example, you know, where a captain is very focused on landing on a short runway and the first officer is watching it, an evolving situation, frankly jumped in and saved the day. And so they worked well together up there, regardless. We have a very standarized procedure so that every person that shows up and flies with me in the right seat has the singular model on what he’s thinking is going to take place in the cockpit, how we run checklists, etc. So not a lot of problems [in relationships between pilots and co-pilots].”
Nathan Fielder’s question has been asked and answered! pic.twitter.com/DX6PWCWeNv
— Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (@TransportDems) June 4, 2025
Fielder wasted no time in responding to the government as he (again) called their answer “dumb” and also shared the thoughts of former NTSB board member John Goglia, whom he worked with closely on season two of The Rehearsal. The comedian and pilot previously called the FAA “dumb” while appearing on CNN.
“I was going to call this dumb, but former NTSB board member John Goglia just texted me and told me to reply with this instead,” Fielder responded on Twitter.
“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.”
I was going to call this dumb, 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… https://t.co/mPpZWhQguW
— nathan fielder (@nathanfielder) June 4, 2025
The second season of The Rehearsal culminated in Fielder, after working his way up to being licensed to fly a 737, piloted a two-hour flight with about 150 actors on board and cameras in the cockpit in order to provide further evidence and research into his thesis that cockpit communication can be improved.