Mike Pryce

Waking up this morning in Atlanta, I’m appalled by what has unfolded since my original post about the shocking audio from the Learjet 60 crash in Florida yesterday. Missile strikes. DEI conspiracies. People inventing increasingly ludicrous explanations and presenting them as fact while investigators are barely beginning their work. The ignorance is staggering. But it’s the treatment of this young co-pilot, including by people purporting to be aviation professionals, that I find utterly sickening. Her gender, her fear and her final words have become ammunition for misogyny and ridicule. That’s wrong on so many levels. I hear a pilot facing something that would terrify any of us, still communicating with air traffic control until the final moments. Thousands of hours in a logbook, or our gender, don’t make us immune to fear, nor allow us to understand everything happening in that cockpit from a few radio calls. And now, even the measured voices asking for evidence, patience and compassion are themselves receiving hate. What has this platform become when even asking for basic human decency invites abuse. I expect better from our profession and humans in general. Seeing people who should know better join this grotesque pile-on leaves me deeply disappointed and disgusted. My heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of everyone lost. Behind every headline and recording are people whose lives have been shattered. They deserve compassion, dignity and answers. Not this.