New Evidence Causes ‘The Rehearsal’ Fans to Have Doubts About Nathan Fielder’s Big Flight

Nathan Fielder is a magician. Literally. The star of Nathan for You and The Rehearsal began his entertainment career as a gawky 13-year-old, performing tricks at children’s birthday parties. In the season finale of The Rehearsal, Fielder even pauses to reflect on his brief magic career while attending a performance by fellow Canadian Shin Lim. But was this just a poetic aside, or a subtle hint that the feat audiences were about to witness was another sly act of deception?

For Fielder, magic isn’t just a ing interest. He’s a member of the Magic Castle, the exclusive magicians’ club in Los Angeles, and more than a decade ago, he claimed that magic was poised to make a comeback in popular culture. To some extent, he may have fulfilled that prophecy himself. 

That’s because much of Fielder’s comedy works in the same basic way that a stage illusion does: He presents a fantastical idea, one that seemingly defies logic, then comes up with a way to bring that vision to life, be it a legal duplicate of Starbucks, or a suit that secretly dispenses hot chili at hockey games.

For many of these stunts, viewers are seemingly let in on the secrets. We’re allowed to see how the trick is done. But other times, we, the audience, are the marks. 

This season of The Rehearsal has been building to an epic finale in which Fielder pilots a 737 full of paid actors, following years of flight training. Amazingly, he accomplishes his goal of opening the lines of communication with his co-pilot, and even manages to not crash the plane and kill everyone on board. But was he really flying that plane? 

A fan on Reddit managed to find a tracking website’s record of Fielder’s flight, which seemingly took place on February 16, 2025. Since the episode didn’t show the plane’s registration number, the figured this out by looking up aerial photography companies in Los Angeles and matching up one company’s plane to the one that followed Fielder on TV. They then found a flight in which the same plane circled San Bernardino, following a 737 belonging to Avelo, the budget airline that’s currently the target of a massive boycott, owing to its participation in ICE deportations. 

But Fielder’s plane didn’t make the flight once, as the episode shows, it seemingly made at least three trips: two on the 16th, and one on the 17th. The first one on the 16th and the third one on the 17th were operated by Nomadic Airlines, the company that Fielder revealed that he began working with at the end of the episode. During the second flight on the 16th, the plane sported an Avelo Airlines call sign.

It’s possible that the multiple flights were purely for the cameras to get more shots of the plane, but this revelation has led some fans to suspect that the footage of Captain Fielder piloting the plane, from both inside and outside of the craft, wasn’t actually from the flight containing the engers. After all, would HBO really sign off on letting a novice pilot fly a commercial plane full of innocent people, for the very first time, all in the service of one of their TV shows?

This isn’t to say that Fielder isn’t capable of flying a 737, he clearly did it, which is hugely impressive. But it does seem possible, and even likely, that any potential risks during the production were mitigated by having a more experienced pilot swap with Fielder and take the controls during the enger flight, for the same reason that magicians don’t actually let any blades come close to sawing their assistants in half.