Nathan Fielder flies full Boeing 737 by exploiting licensing loophole, dodging autism diagnosis

Nathan Fielder is taking to the skies — and sticking the landing.

After five episodes interrogating airline safety and pilot interpersonal dynamics, the Nathan for You mastermind revealed that he received his pilot’s license in Sunday’s season 2 finale of The Rehearsal.

The super-sized episode shows Fielder learning to fly over the course of two years.

“When I first began this project, I had decided there was no better way to understand pilots than to become one myself,” Fielder says via voiceover at the beginning of the ep. “But it became clear very quickly that I was not a natural at this. Especially when it came to landing the plane.”

The comedian says that most aspiring pilots typically are approved to fly solo after just 10 to 30 hours of supervised flying, but it took him seven months and over 120 hours before he began landing planes to his instructors’ satisfaction.

“I was apparently such an abnormal case that they started passing me around to different instructors in an effort to diagnose what was going on with me,” he explains.

Eventually, Fielder successfully obtained his pilot’s license, which allowed him to set up the finale’s central stunt: flying a commercial-size aircraft full of passengers in order to simulate the cockpit dynamics of a typical commercial flight. 

“No one sees all the nuances of communication in there, how subtle it is, the disconnects,” Fielder tells John Goglia, the former National Transportation Safety Board member with whom he consulted on previous episodes. “No one knows what’s happening. What I’m thinking is: a real flight in a 737 with real passengers at 25,000 feet, and for the first time, cameras in the cockpit for the entire time — and I know I can get them in there because I will be the pilot.”

Fielder explains that despite not having the typical 1,500 hours of flight time typically required to become a commercial pilot, he’s concocted a plan to fly a plane packed with passengers.

With just around 280 hours of flight time before he attempts the stunt, Fielder details the loophole that allows him to give it a whirl.

“You can go private pilot, instrument, commercial — you can go right to a 737 type rating, and if you’re not technically working for an airline — so there’s a loophole, right?” he asks Goglia.

“That’s correct,” Goglia responds. “But you’re not gonna fly passengers with that.”

Fielder anticipates that response and has already circumvented that issue by recruiting his own set of passengers. “Well, you can’t fly paying passengers, but if the plane is filled with actors, you can do it,” he says.

Goglia confirms that his strategy should work. “Yep. That’s right,” he says. “There is a loophole for that.”

The comedian undergoes Boeing 737 training in Henderson, Nev., and secures a used 737 for the big act. A few days before the flight, Fielder fills out a medical review form as part of the pre-flight protocol.

“If you lie on this form, it’s a felony offense, with a maximum sentence of five years in prison,” he says as he lingers on a yes-or-no question that asks if he has “mental disorders of any sort: depression, anxiety, etc.”

Fielder says, “I’ve never been officially diagnosed with anxiety, but I’ve definitely felt the emotion. A lot actually. And I’ve been feeling it for months about this upcoming flight. Also, this word et cetera at the end of the sentence confused me. What else did they mean by et cetera?”

The comedian then goes to a doctor “to be sure I was representing my current state of health accurately,” and receives an fMRI scan that he’s told can detect a number of mental and neurological conditions, including anxiety, schizophrenia, and autism. Fielder asks the doctor specifically about autism, as the previous episode, “Washington,” shows him struggling to correctly answer questions as part of an autism diagnosis test and has a strong subtextual undercurrent suggesting that he might have undiagnosed autism.

Fielder is then disappointed when the fMRI technician tells him that he won’t be able to receive the results of his scan for at least two weeks, which means they won’t be ready in time for the flight.

“I found a thread where someone posted that their friend was a regional first officer who was just diagnosed with autism,” he explains as he looks over a Reddit post. “In the responses, all the pilots were perplexed as to why he would get tested in the first place. They said you can lose your license by disclosing something like this. I mean, with the knowledge I had, I’m fit to fly. So I guess I’m fit to fly.”

Fielder directly addresses the camera to explain why he wants to make the flight. “I’m trying to demonstrate how hard it can be for any pilot to say what they’re thinking in a cockpit environment, and this dangerous phenomenon that leads to planes crashing, I truly believe happens in some form on every single airline flight,” he says.

He explains, “The second I see my copilot thinking something he’s not saying, you’re gonna get to see that, and then I’m gonna quickly jump in and ask him about how he’s feeling so he can share that with me and be comfortable sharing that, and nothing will be left unspoken.”

After filling the plane with actors, many of whom are recognizable from previous episodes, the comedian successfully handles the takeoff, and explains that the flight will last around two hours and 10 minutes, and will simply take the passengers from San Bernardino International Airport to the airspace around the Nevada border, then turn around and land in San Bernardino again.

The flight continues without a hitch, and Fielder attempts to open the lines of communication with his copilot, Aaron, by repeatedly asking him if everything is okay. It also appears that the comedian has intentionally engineered circumstances that made Aaron uncomfortable by commissioning a separate plane with a camera crew to fly in close proximity to the 737 to film the cockpit from the outside.

Fielder later asks Aaron to participate in an acting exercise he’s developed that he hopes will encourage honesty among copilots, suggesting they play characters named “First Officer Blunt” and “Captain Allears,” who are excellent at giving and receiving honest feedback.

After introducing the idea, Aaron discloses that Fielder forgot to retract the plane’s flaps during takeoff. “You can tell me in the moment if I forget anything,” Fielder responds. “I love knowing what I do wrong.”

Fielder successfully lands the plane, and his passengers applaud his piloting skills after departing the aircraft.

In the finale’s penultimate scene, the winner of Fielder’s fake singing competition show, Wings of Voice, sings Evanescene’s “Bring Me to Life” as the comedian watches from a distance. As she performs, Fielder checks his phone and discovers a voicemail from the doctor’s office. The transcription of the message reads, “Hi good morning it’s Dr. Jordan’s office calling we have the results of your FM RI scans please give us a call set up a time to discuss your test results thank you…”

Then, in perhaps the show’s most shocking moment, Fielder deletes the voicemail, suggesting that he intends to ignore the results of the scan if they reveal any conditions that might interfere with his piloting. He’s fully converted to the willful ignorance that he learned some pilots maintain in order to keep their licenses and jobs — thus personally demonstrating how pilots are implicitly discouraged from being completely honest about their mental and emotional states.

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In the season’s final scene, Fielder reveals that he’s continued piloting empty 737s as a side gig, explaining that the job sometimes takes him to rural Ecuador to fly the decommissioned planes over the Amazon rainforest.

“For some reason, they trusted me,” he says. “I was one of two pilots in the cockpit, and sometimes, when they’d be on a bathroom break, it was just me in there, flying over the Atlantic Ocean for hours until the welcoming sands of Namibia come into view.” 

Fielder continues: “They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size. And it feels good to know that. No one is allowed in a cockpit if there’s something wrong with them. So if you’re here, you must be fine.”

All six episodes of The Rehearsal season 2 are streaming on Max.