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By Christopher Roberts
Global Publishing Editor
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As my colleagues might tell you with a weary grimace, I’m something of an aviation nerd. Most people would regard an unsolved plane crash as a tragedy. I do also regard it as a tragedy, but also as an opportunity to review several hundred pages of engrossing technical documentation.
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This explains my excitement at Newsweek’s coverage of the latest expedition to find Amelia Earhart’s missing Lockheed Electra. First, researchers set out for a remote Pacific island to investigate a mysterious object in satellite photographs. Then the expedition reached a critical phase, and the aviation world waited with bated breath. Finally, the discovery: it was a collection of trees.
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Nearly 90 years after Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared, the Pacific Ocean (soon to be renamed the Trump Ocean, perhaps) has yielded another disappointment. The thing is, we were always going to be disappointed. Did Earhart run out of fuel? Was she lost because of a navigational error? Did she land safely and survive for a time? Was she captured by the Japanese? The wreckage may yield answers to some of these questions. Everything else would remain unknown. Plane crash investigators are careful not to jump to conclusions, but to weigh the evidence.
Imagine applying that principle to American politics. Now that’s a real plane crash. Democrats would blame the right wing. Republicans would blame the left wing. Case closed before anyone reached the crash site.
A poll by the Survey Center on American Life once found that 58 percent of Americans became more certain of their political views when talking with people who disagreed with them. Fasten your seat belts, because it gets worse.
A Pew Research Center survey published in March 2026 found that 53 percent of Americans considered their fellow citizens morally or ethically bad. Of the 25 countries surveyed, the United States was the only one where a majority held that view. This kind of thinking has risen dramatically since 2016. (I’ll leave you to work out the significance of that date.)
There is a serious problem here. Some things really are wrong. But there is also an ocean between believing something is right and believing there is nothing left to learn.
Aviation understands this distinction better than almost any other industry. Its safety record, scandals and catastrophes notwithstanding, is not the product of investigators insisting that pilots, manufacturers and regulators are always correct. It is the product of discovering exactly how they were wrong, sometimes at a terrible human cost.
In politics, by contrast, admitting a mistake is treated as evidence of weakness. On social media, changing your mind is practically grounds for impeachment. In the national news media, it’s all too easy to reinforce the opinions of your readers.
Earhart’s plane may yet be found. America’s ability to say “I was wrong” seems to have disappeared without a trace. It might be worth rediscovering that instinct before 2028.
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