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Wednesday night’s deadly airplane crash was tragic—and, to many experts, not altogether surprising. The collision between a commercial airplane and a military helicopter in Washington, D.C., has led many people to take a closer look at the complex systems that commercial flying relies on, and the strain that some of those systems are under. I spoke with my colleague Ian Bogost, who writes often about the airline industry, about the factors that shape our perceptions of flying.

Lora Kelley: This incident is not an aberration, but rather something experts seem to have seen coming. What were some of the warning signs?

Ian Bogost: Aviation experts had been fearing that something like this would happen not just at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, but all across the country. Near misses have been on the rise, as have “runway incursions”—planes accidentally sharing the same space with other planes. I won’t pretend to understand all of the reasons for that—and that’s part of the problem. The issues here aren’t as simple as something like screws falling off. Rather, near misses and accidents have to do with the whole system of aviation management: pilot experience; air-traffic-control staffing; the number of planes in the air; the complex airspace around Washington, D.C., in this case. More Americans are flying too, and growing demand puts new pressure on all of these systems in invisible ways.

Lora: How should people think about flying at this moment?

Ian: Commercial airlines want you to feel comfortable flying, because their business depends on it. The evolution of commercial air travel, especially in America, has made it so you don’t even have to look at or smell or hear the equipment to the same extent that passengers once did. You’re protected from many things that remind you that you’re in a machine hurtling through the air at 500 miles per hour.

Commercial air travel really is quite safe. When I say commercial air travel, I mean when you fly a major carrier on a scheduled flight that’s regulated. Safety in the cabin has also improved. Flight attendants worked very hard over many decades to establish themselves as safety professionals and not just service staff. The flight crew is trained to act in case of an emergency, and they’re highly prepared to do so. But because travel is so safe, you never get to see them perform that expertise—God forbid you see them perform that expertise.

Lora: Airlines are quite consolidated, and the system of flight relies on a range of factors beyond just individual companies. How does consolidation factor into safety?

Ian: We have fewer choices in flight than we used to—fewer airlines, fewer routes, fewer airport hubs. That does have an impact on safety. One way this plays out is, if you have fewer options for direct flights, you might have to opt for a layover. Takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous part of air travel. So if you can reduce takeoffs and landings—for example, by taking one flight instead of two—you’re safer, at least statistically. This is all still safer than driving somewhere in a car.

It’s really difficult for consumers to make rational decisions about safety today. Especially because we don’t really know what happened yet with this incident, we don’t know how great the risk is of it happening again. I’ve heard people start to consider making changes to their habits, although I don’t think we’re going to see many folks change their plans in the long run. After a door plug blew off during an Alaska Airlines flight last year, I started to see people saying they would try to avoid the aircraft in question, a Boeing 737-9 MAX. Are those people actually safer? Who knows.

Lora: Why do people often pin their safety fears on airplanes themselves, rather than focusing on the people or systems that operate them?

Ian: In the case of flying, people tend to target their concern toward the concrete, visceral problems they can see and touch: Is there a screw loose? Is my seat broken? We mostly don’t consider the more systemic, intangible ones, such as staffing issues and maintenance routines and airspace-traffic patterns.

When an accident like this week’s happens, however, we get a brief insight into just how complex modern life is. For all of us, it’s certainly much easier not to have to think about that complexity.

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The Benefit of Doing Things You’re Bad At

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Between my university lectures and outside speeches about the science of happiness, I do a lot of public speaking, and am always looking for ways to do so with more clarity and fluency. To that end, I regularly give talks in two languages that are not my own—not random languages, of course, but rather those I learned as an adult: Spanish and Catalan …

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Can Jewish space lasers protect America? At first glance, President Donald Trump seems to think so. The 2024 Republican Party platform had just 20 planks, consisting of only 277 words. Twelve of those words were: “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY.” Since taking office, Trump has moved to make good on that pledge. On January 27, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised swift action on the subject. That night, Trump signed an executive order titled “The Iron Dome for America,” turning the plan into policy.

In actuality, what Trump is proposing looks very little like Israel’s Iron Dome. His executive order calls for a space-based interception system to counter “ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles.” Iron Dome is a land-based array that mostly targets unsophisticated short-range rockets and mortars fired by terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel supplements this system with several other layers of missile defense, including David’s Sling and Arrow 3, which did most of the work repelling Iran’s aerial assaults on the country last April and October. Later this year, Israel is also expected to roll out Iron Beam, a laser-based system that can down projectiles for a fraction of the cost of Iron Dome’s interceptors—provided that it isn’t raining.

Many of these systems were developed with American partnership, and some could perhaps be adapted for deployment in the United States—although, as a land mass surrounded by oceans, the U.S. homeland has very different defense needs than the tiny Israeli state. But the point of Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” is not its feasibility. The system doesn’t have to work—or even exist—for it to serve the president’s interests.

[Read: The costly success of Israel’s iron dome]

A singular self-promoter, Trump excels at cutting through the cacophony of American politics with bold, blunt, and often cinematic images—such as “Iron Dome for America.” At a time when civil discourse is scattered across innumerable media platforms, attention is arguably a public figure’s most important resource, and Trump knows how to monopolize it. As when the president promised draconian tariffs against Mexico during his first weeks in office only to fold before they went into effect, he has figured out what our sclerotic political system actually rewards—brash bombast, not results—and governs accordingly, performing toughness rather than achieving outcomes.

This talent for theatricality is actually a big part of how Trump became president in the first place. In 2015, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas launched his own presidential bid as a harsh critic of illegal immigration, promising in a detailed 4,700-word policy platform to “secure the border once and for all.” Yet Cruz failed to gain traction, because he was bigfooted by a political outsider who had no policy experience but unmatched show business savvy. Trump promised to “build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” and rode that mantra to the presidency—after which the wall was never completed and Mexico did not pay for it.

Given Trump’s exceptional instinct for indelible images, that he landed on the Iron Dome as his latest gimmick is no surprise. For both Israel’s supporters and its detractors, the country’s missile-defense system emblemizes the technological frontier of warfare, thanks to countless photos and videos of its dramatic mid-air interceptions of enemy projectiles. As someone who made his name in real estate and television by manipulating people’s perceptions, Trump intuitively grasped the power of the Iron Dome in the popular imagination, and crudely co-opted it. Whether the system’s details make sense for America is not particularly important. For his purposes, the symbolism supercedes the substance.

Ronald Reagan, himself a former actor, also understood that a grand missile-defense project would appeal to the public consciousness. Critics derided Reagan’s plan as “Star Wars,” but its futuristic feel was precisely what made it so captivating, which is why the project consistently polled well, despite never coming to fruition.

Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was a fanciful eccentricity in an otherwise robust governing agenda. But for Trump, flashy contrivances such as Iron Dome for America are the agenda. Unlike Reagan, who developed a broad political philosophy over his years in public life, Trump has few real principles and little interest in the nitty-gritty of legislation. He cares less about long-term outcomes than about being seen to be driving events. This is why he prefers to rule through grand pronouncements and executive actions, even though these are often ephemeral and can easily be tied up in litigation or overturned by a successor.

[Read: Trump doesn’t believe anything. That’s why he wins.]

Such indifference to end results might seem like a recipe for disappointing one’s supporters. But Trump is betting that in today’s chaotic information and political environment, appearing to care about issues that voters care about will be more important than actually delivering on them. And he has reason to be optimistic: Trump’s electoral coalition depends on people who don’t closely follow politics; many of them are less aware of the policies a politician implements than the image he projects. Trump, ever the performer, has mastered the art of marketing himself to the masses, and has used this skill to transform American politics.

In 2016, Cruz had a punctilious 25-point plan to curb illegal immigration; Trump had a sensational slogan about making Mexico pay for it—and trounced him. President Joe Biden’s economic policies delivered major gains for low-wage workers; Trump’s proposed tariffs are essentially a tax on those workers, but they voted for him over Biden, because Trump appeared to be vigorously fighting for them. Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency is a basket case run by people with little government experience, and is less likely than a commission staffed by experts to effectively curb federal spending without ugly unintended consequences. But DOGE is also a far more visible endeavor, fronted by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. The Abraham Accords were mostly a symbolic handshake between Middle Eastern countries that had never fought a war against one another, but Trump’s branding and ceremony made the agreements into something more.

Again and again, Trump has managed to transmute political performance into the appearance of political achievement. Whether it’s promising a border wall or an Iron Dome, he may not be America’s most competent president, but he is its greatest showman, and in our broken political system, that might be enough to maintain his dominance over our collective attention and affairs of state.