Nathan Fielder has confirmed that he really did learn to fly a Boeing 737 in order to pull off the audacious finale of the second season of his HBO show The Rehearsal.
The series used outlandish methods to examine very real issues surrounding the ability of co-pilots to communicate clearly with one another.
During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Fielder commented on a clip of him flying a 737 in the finale: “That’s me, I’m really flying that plane. It looks weird, right? But that’s real.”
He continued: “This whole season of The Rehearsal is about pilots, and aviation, so to do a good job at this and really understand pilots, I decided early on that the best way to understand them is to become one myself.
“So I trained for almost two-and-a-half years and worked my way up through private pilot, instrument, commercial, and I got a 737 type rating, so I am a licensed 737 pilot.”
The 42-year-old comedian went on to explain that he believes that poor communication between pilots has been a leading contributing factor in many plane crashes.
“That’s why I went as far as becoming a 737 pilot, because I wanted to demonstrate that on a regular flight where two pilots are just trying their best, that communication between the co-pilots, captain and first officer, can be a struggle,” he explained.
Giving further details about how the final episode came together, he added: “I found someone who would lease me a 737. It’s very hard to convince someone to lease a comedian a 737, but I found someone to do it and we chartered a real flight over the Mojave desert. We went from San Bernardino round to Las Vegas and then looped back, with cameras filming the whole time.
“You can see that we’re both trying our best to communicate, and it’s a struggle. I do think, and this is in the show, and you can see it, that when people look back at this ‘Miracle over the Mojave’, that they can see a turning point in aviation.”
Asked by Kimmel whether he can really compare the episode to the Miracle on the Hudson, the 2009 incident where Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger successfully landed a doomed Airbus A320 flight into New York’s Hudson River, saving 155 passengers, Fielder joked: “Not to create a competition or anything, but I did put my plane down safely on land.”
In a previous installment of The Rehearsal, Fielder played out scenes from throughout Sullenberger’s life in an episode branded one of the “most unhinged” and “hysterical” pieces of TV ever made.
