MAGA influencers have some hard-hitting questions about the Delta Air Lines flight that crash-landed at Toronto Pearson Airport on Monday, namely: Was the pilot a woman?
After discovering that Endeavor Air, a regional airline that was operating Monday’s flight from Minneapolis, celebrates its female pilots and crew members on social media, the MAGAverse was suddenly not interested in whether the landing gear failed, or if the plane hit a piece of debris on the runway, or if an unpredictable gust of wind called a “wind shear” accelerated the landing.
They just want to know who the pilots were.
“So are they ever going to tell us anything about the pilots who crash landed and flipped the plane upside down?” MAGA influencer Matt Walsh wrote on the social media platform X on Wednesday.
MAGA accounts Libs of TikTok and End Wokeness also posted videos from Endeavor implying the crash was related to the airline’s “unmanned” flights featuring all-female crews—even though the deadliest plane crashes in U.S. history have all been piloted by men.
On Monday, a flight carrying 80 people caught fire and flipped over seconds after touching down in Toronto. Ground crews quickly put out the fires and evacuated the passengers—who were suspended upside down in their seats like bats—incredibly avoiding any serious injuries.
A retired Delta pilot who broke down a video of the crash for Insider said everything looked normal until the right-side landing gear appeared to fail during touchdown.
It wasn’t clear if the tire failed or if the plane hit something on the runway, said Mark Stephens, who worked in aviation for 32 years. But after the right side collapsed, the wing collided with the ground and was ripped off. The fuel in the wing then caught fire. Meanwhile, the lift generated by the left wing—which was basically still flying—then ripped off the tail and flipped the plane over.
“I don’t see a pilot error in this,” Stephens said. “You’re landing at 150, 140 miles an hour, and within a second the wing is on the ground, it’s in the fire, it’s rolling upside down and it’s sliding. It’s an amazing event that happened probably in the blink of an eye for the guys flying.”
The reason nobody was injured was because the pilots, flight crew and ground crews all did their jobs, he added. An aviation management professor at McGill University in Montreal also praised the pilots—as well as the firefighting team and the aircraft manufacturer—for saving the people on board.
“Everybody walked away, and to me, that is a miracle on that airplane,” Professor John Gradek told the CBC.
That would seem to make the pilots heroes. And the person overseeing the “miraculous” ground rescue operation was Greater Toronto Airports Authority President and CEO Deborah Flint, a woman of color who previously served as CEO of Los Angeles World Airports and Interim Director of the Port of Oakland in California.
As for the crash itself, some analysts said the plane had come in low and fast on the runway instead of doing a “flare” maneuver in which the pilot lifts the nose of the plane to slow down before landing, the AP reported.
It wasn’t clear why the maneuver wasn’t performed; experts said it could have been human error, or there could have been other factors at play.
For example, the pilot could have been fighting a wind shear, which is a sudden change in wind speed or direction, the director of an aviation intelligence company told Newsweek. Toronto was experiencing wind gusts of up to 40 mph around the time of the crash, and more than 20 inches of snow had fallen over the weekend, CNN reported.
One of the engine thrusts might have failed to deploy, or the brakes might not have been working properly. Investigators sent the flight’s voice recorder and flight data recorder—colloquially known as its “black boxes—for lab analysis on Tuesday, Reuters reported.
But the MAGAverse was still ready to pin the blame on DEI less than 48 hours after the crash.
“It’s not that women can’t fly planes. It’s that in order to get all-female flights with such a small availability pool you have to go further down the list. The crash appeared to be pilot error,” wrote influencer Tim Pool, a podcaster with no discernible experience staffing airlines, training pilots or investigating plane crashes.
Most crashes are actually caused by a combination of factors, Reuters reported.
Since the MAGA influencers started asking about the pilots, posts on the airline’s Instagram account that feature women and people of color have since been hit with comments like, “I feel like pilots should be qualified in flying rather than DEI,” and “Get you a pilot based on merit and not gender.”
The posts featuring white men were strangely unaffected.
