“Can you never do that again?” my son texted me on Monday in our family group chat. I had sent a series of photos of my flight in the tiny Cessna Caravan that had just flown my mortal being 120 miles, from Chicago O’Hare International Airport to West Lafayette, Indiana. The nine-seat aircraft, which runs on a single turboprop engine, was so small that the ground crew had to weigh luggage and passengers in order to distribute their weight evenly in the cabin. It was, in short, the kind of plane that makes it easy to fear for your life. By contrast, I hadn’t been concerned at all—and my son had found no cause to worry—about the American Airlines regional jet that I’d taken on the first leg of my trip, from St. Louis to Chicago.

Just a few days later, an American Airlines regional jet collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter in Washington, D.C., killing everyone involved: 60 passengers, four crew members, and three service members. The National Transportation Safety Board has said it will take at least a year to identify a final probable cause of the crash. Until then, one can only guess that the aircrafts and their machinery were not themselves to blame. The New York Times has reported that the relevant air-traffic-control tower may have been understaffed and that the helicopter might have been outside its flight path. As Juliette Kayyem wrote for The Atlantic yesterday, a rise in flight traffic has been increasing the risk of midair collisions for years, especially in busy airspace such as Washington’s.

[Read: The near misses at airports have been telling us something]

Statistically, for now at least, flying is still much safer than driving. According to the International Air Transport Association, on average a person would have to travel by plane every day for more than 100,000 years before experiencing a fatal accident. A host of factors has made flying more reliable, among them more dependable equipment, better pilot training, tighter regulations, stricter maintenance standards, advances in air-traffic control, and improved weather forecasting. But the amorphous, interlocking systems that realize commercial flight are hard to see or understand, even as they keep us safe. For ordinary passengers—people like me and my son—any sense of danger tends to focus on the plane itself, because the plane is right in front of us, and above our heads, and underneath our feet, and lifting us up into the sky. A fear of flying makes little sense, because flying is just physics. One really fears airplanes, the aluminum tubes in which a fragile human body may be trapped while it is brought into flight. A machine like that can crash. A machine like that can kill you.

The Boeing 737 Max’s recent string of mishaps, including two fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019, and, more recently, a lost door during flight, are still fresh in the minds of passengers, and history only reinforces the fear. In 1950, a TWA Lockheed Constellation en route from Mumbai to New York crashed when its engine caught on fire and detached. In 1979, another engine detachment on a DC-10 wide-body jet caused the crash of American Airlines Flight 191. In 1988, an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 lost an 18-foot-long section of upper fuselage on the way from Hilo to Honolulu. Human error—a contributing factor in most crashes, if not their direct cause—can also stem from equipment failure, as in the case of Pan Am Flight 812 in 1974 and Air France Flight 447 in 2009.

Yet the salience of an airplane’s actual machinery has been fading too. For passengers, the experience of commercial flight may be worse than ever, but the planes themselves now seem more reliable and more accommodating (if only so many passengers weren’t packed into them). Twenty years ago, regional flights would commonly use turboprops to transport passengers between hubs and small-to-medium-size cities. These planes were louder and bumpier. Flying in them felt worse, and it inspired more anxiety for that reason.

Are little turboprops actually more dangerous than jets? A direct comparison is difficult, because the smaller planes are often used for shorter flights, and more flights mean more takeoffs and landings—when most accidents occur. But the numbers are somewhat reassuring overall, at least when it comes to commercial flight. (The numbers for general aviation, which includes recreational planes, skydiving operations, bush flying, and the rest of civilian noncommercial flight, are less reassuring.) The NTSB filed investigations into eight fatal aviation accidents in the United States from 2000 to 2024 that involved commercial aircraft with turboprop engines, and 13 for aircraft with turbo fans (the most common passenger-jet engine).

In any case, modern airport logistics, just like modern jumbo jets, have helped build a sense of safety—or at least hide a source of fear. U.S. passengers used to board and disembark their flights from the tarmac with more regularity. This was true of prop planes and bigger jets alike. The shrill whine of turbines and the sweet smell of aviation fuel made the mechanisms of flight more palpable; it reminded you that you were entering a machine. Nowadays, that reality is hidden. You board comfortable, quiet cabins from the climate-controlled shelter of jet bridges.

All of these changes have tamped down the fear of planes to the point that, for many passengers, it will now resurface only under certain throwback conditions—such as when I found myself bobbing over the Hoosier farms in a plane cabin the size of a taco truck. That sort of white-knuckling is a distraction from the truer, more pervasive risks of air travel in 2025. The systemic lapses and conditions that have produced frequent near misses in aviation, and that may have contributed to this week’s accident, now seem likely to worsen under the Trump administration, which has purged the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration, and blamed DEI for a fatal crash.

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

The nation’s pervasive weakness in aviation safety is genuinely scary, but it’s shapeless, too. It provokes the sort of fright that you feel in your bones, the sort that makes you entreat a loved one to please never fly in one of those again, okay? And yet, I might well have been safer in the cold cabin of a turboprop 5,000 feet above Indiana than I would have been on an approach to an overcrowded, understaffed airport in a quiet regional jet. The plane still seems like the thing that might kill you. Even now, I suspect it always will.

From inside the room, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings felt at times more like an awards show than a job interview. While the health-secretary nominee testified, his fans in the audience hooted and hollered in support. Even a five-minute bathroom break was punctuated by a standing ovation from spectators and cheers of “We love you, Bobby!” There were some detractors as well—one protester was ushered out after screaming “He lies!” and interrupting the proceedings—but they were dramatically outnumbered by people wearing Make America Healthy Again T-shirts and Confirm RFK Jr. hats.

The MAHA faithful have plenty of reason to be excited. If confirmed, RFK Jr. would oversee an agency that manages nearly $2 trillion, with the authority to remake public health in his image. “He just represents the exact opposite of all these establishment agencies,” Brandon Matlack, a 34-year-old who worked on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, told me on Wednesday. We chatted as he waited in a line of more than 150 people that snaked down a flight of stairs—all of whom were hoping to get a seat for the hearing. Many of them were relegated to an overflow room.

Of course, Matlack and other RFK Jr. fans could be in for a letdown. Whether Kennedy will actually be confirmed as health secretary is still up in the air. There was less raucous cheering during the hearing on Thursday, as Kennedy faced tough questions from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whose vote could be decisive in determining whether Kennedy gets confirmed. But the realization of RFK Jr.’s vision for health care in America may not hinge on his confirmation. The MAHA movement has turned the issue of chronic disease into such a potent political talking point that people like Matlack are willing to trek from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., just to support Kennedy. Politicians across the country are hearing from self-proclaimed “MAHA moms” (and likely some dads too) urging them to enact reforms. They’re starting to listen.

Kennedy is best known as an anti-vaccine activist who spreads conspiracy theories. His more outlandish ideas are shared by some MAHA supporters, but the movement itself is primarily oriented around improving America’s diet and the health problems it causes us. Some of the ways MAHA wants to go about that, such as pressuring food companies to not use seed oils, are not exactly scientific; others do have some research behind them. Consider artificial food dyes, a major MAHA rallying cry. Multiple food dyes have been shown in animal studies to be carcinogenic. And although a candy-corn aficionado likely isn’t going to die from the product’s red dye, the additive is effectively banned in the European Union. (Kennedy claims that food dyes are driving down America’s life expectancy. There’s no evidence directly linking food dyes to declining human life expectancy, though one study did show that they cut short the life of fruit flies.)

Until recently, concerns over food additives, such as artificial dyes, were the domain of Democrats. In 2023, California became the first state in the nation to ban certain food additives: red dye 3, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil, and propylparaben. But now food-additive bans are being proposed in Donald Trump country, including West Virginia, Arkansas, and Kentucky. Some of the efforts, such as the Make Arkansas Healthy Again Act, are an explicit attempt to enact Kennedy’s agenda.

In other states, something a bit more Schoolhouse Rock is happening: The purported dangers of food ingredients are riling up Americans, who are then going to their lawmakers seeking change. Eric Brooks, a Republican state legislator in West Virginia, told me that he decided to copy California’s food-additive bill after being prodded by a constituent. “I said, Well, I don’t normally look out West, especially out to California, for policy ideas, to be honest with you,” he told me. “But once I had done the research and I saw the validity of the issue, I said, Okay.” Although his bill, which was first introduced in January 2024, did not move forward in the previous legislative session because, in his words, “there were bigger fish to fry,” Brooks hopes the national interest coming from the MAHA movement will motivate West Virginia legislators to take another look at the proposal.

Other red-state efforts to follow California’s lead have similarly not yet been passed into law, but the fact that the bills have been introduced at all signifies how motivated Republicans are on the topic. The MAHA moms may be enough to propel Kennedy to the job of health secretary. One Republican, Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, told Kennedy on Thursday that he plans to vote to confirm him because doing anything else “would be thumbing my nose at that movement.” Republicans are not only introducing bills to ban food additives; they’re also taking up Kennedy’s other MAHA priorities. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently asked the federal government for permission to forbid food-stamp recipients in her state from using their benefits to buy junk food—a policy Kennedy has repeatedly called for.

Over the past two days, senators seemed shocked at just how loyal a following Kennedy has amassed. One pejoratively called him a prophet. MAHA believers I spoke with made clear that they want RFK Jr.—and only RFK Jr.—to lead this movement. Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer who goes by “Food Babe” on Instagram, told me that, if Kennedy fails to be confirmed, there “will be an uprising like you have never seen.”

But at this point, it seems that the movement could live on even without Kennedy. On Wednesday, the Heritage Foundation hosted a press gaggle with MAHA surrogates. Heritage, an intellectual home of the modern conservative movement, is now praising the banning of food dyes. This is the same pro-business think tank that a decade ago warned that should the FDA ban partially hydrogenated oils, trans fats that were contributing to heart attacks, the agency “would be taking away choices,” “disrespecting” Americans’ autonomy, and mounting “an attack on dietary decisions.”

Republicans have generally been a bulwark for the food industry against policies that could hurt its bottom line. Democrats and Republicans in Washington today seem more aligned on food issues than ever before. “When you have members on both sides of the aisle whose constituencies are now extremely interested in understanding fully what’s in their food products, it does shift the game a bit,” Brandon Lipps, a food lobbyist and a former USDA official under Trump, told me. After all, even Bernie Sanders, despite chastising Kennedy multiple times during this week’s confirmation hearings, professed his support for aspects of the MAHA movement. “I agree with you,” Sanders told Kennedy on Thursday, that America needs “a revolution in the nature of food.” During the same hearing, Cassidy said that he is struggling with Kennedy’s candidacy because, despite their deep disagreements on vaccine policy, on “ultra-processed foods, obesity, we are simpatico. We are completely aligned.”

Although MAHA has shown itself to be a unifying message, the real test will come down to the brass tacks of any political movement: passing actual legislation. How willing lawmakers—especially those with pro-business proclivities—will be to buck the status quo remains to be seen. Politicians have proved eager to speak out against ultra-processed foods; in that sense, MAHA is winning. But policy victories may still be a ways off.