Comedian, showrunner, and pilot Nathan Fielder has become embroiled in a dispute with the Federal Aviation Administration over his show’s hypothesis that poor communication between pilots and co-pilots causes plane crashes.

The second season of Fielder’s HBO comedy The Rehearsal concluded on Sunday, generating a tremendous amount of buzz over the real-world applications of his experiment. The show focuses on Fielder’s attempts to help others with difficult life decisions by creating meticulous, elaborate “rehearsals,” replete with detailed sets and actors, allowing the subjects to practice making the decision. For the second season, Fielder expanded a rehearsal testing an airline first officer’s assertiveness into a broader test regarding pilot communication.

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In the season finale, Fielder revealed he had been training for two years to obtain a pilot’s license, culminating in him flying a Boeing 737 aircraft across California and Nevada while carrying passengers — an event he repeatedly referred to as the “Miracle over the Mojave,” a nod to the infamous “Miracle on the Hudson” event in 2009 when pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger safely landed a plane on New York’s Hudson River after the engines blew out.

Fielder and former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia, who featured in the show, are now looking to push authorities to incorporate in-depth training to encourage pilot communication. The FAA didn’t receive the duo’s message as well as they’d hoped.

In a statement to CNN, relayed by host Pamela Brown on Thursday’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown, the FAA said it “mandates all airline pilots and crew members to complete interpersonal communication training,” and “isn’t seeing the data that supports the show’s central claim, that pilot communications is to blame for airline disaster.”

Fielder, who was wearing a “737” baseball cap, didn’t take kindly to the response.

“That’s dumb. They’re dumb,” he responded bluntly.

“I trained to be a pilot, and I’m a 737 pilot. I went through the training. The training is, someone shows you a PowerPoint slide saying, ‘if you are a co-pilot and the captain does something wrong, you need to speak up about it.’ That’s all. That’s the training. And they talk about some crashes that happened, but they don’t do anything that makes it stick emotionally … so pilots think they’ll act a certain way in an accident,” but act differently in the heat of the moment, Fielder said.

As an analogy, the comedian used the CNN show as an example, saying host Brown wouldn’t speak up if she thought host Wolf Blitzer was doing something wrong, a problem that’s simply “a human thing.” When she tried to push back, suggesting they had good communication and were on equal footing, Fielder said she was only saying as much because she had “to say that.”

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“So that’s intimidating,” he said of Blitzer’s stature as a high-profile journalist who has starred in movies in movies. “That can be intimidating. That’s sort of the thing we’re trying to explore a little.”

Fielder said on the show that his interest in airline safety came as a result of a side fascination with airline crashes. When he examined the audio recordings of the final moments of plane cockpits before they crashed, he picked up on a pattern showing a lack of communication between the co-pilot and pilot, with the former often seemingly afraid of speaking up. The newly christened pilot’s suggested solution, previously put forward by Goglia years back, is roleplaying exercises to encourage co-pilots to overcome the stigma and speak up if they disagree with a pilot’s decision.

The show also got the attention of Congress, partially due to an episode where Fielder tries to get his concept implemented through a meeting with Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), then the ranking member on the aviation safety subcommittee. The meeting appeared to end abruptly and awkwardly after Fielder suggested pushing for his idea, a characterization disputed by Cohen.

The Instagram account for the House Transportation Democrats thanked Fielder for an appearance at the aviation safety subcommittee.

NATHAN FIELDER’S CINÉMA VÉRITÉ

Fielder, who came to fame through his parody reality show Nathan for You, is known for his absurdist comedy that blends the lines between reality and fiction. In his first show, the comedian posed as a business expert to help struggling business owners. His ideas to “fix” the businesses are absurd, but his deadpan delivery causes most to allow him to carry out the plan. His antics on the show earned him real-life attention from outlets unaware that they were his projects, such as an elaborately staged video of a pig saving a goat from drowning, or a parody coffee shop called “Dumb Starbucks,” allowing it to gain widespread attention while being protected from lawsuits under copyright laws.

Throughout both shows, much of the humor relies on Fielder’s real or acted awkward persona.