Something about the guy’s logic seems off - he’s creeped out about being messaged using a location-based networking application and decides he needs to get off the plane as quickly as possible, then talks to the guy, and then deletes the app.
The guy claims he was flying Delta and was connecting the same day to Nashville, but Delta doesn’t fly from Chicago to Nashville.
While the supposed pilot’s profile picture is of a cockpit, it sure looks to me like the cockpit of a single-engine plane, based on the prop that’s in front (it’s possible I’m seeing something incorrectly here, but I’m fairly confident).
It doesn’t even seem probable that the pilot could have sent this before departure the earliest flight from Minneapolis to Chicago in the schedule departs at 6:50AM.
Let’s look at the timestamps of all this - the message was supposedly sent at 5:23AM, and he says it was sent 30 minutes before landing, so unless Delta has some secretive pre-5AM departure from Minneapolis to Chicago that I’m missing, that doesn’t add up.
First of all, if you’re connected to airplane Wi-Fi, Grindr will not load and connect you to nearby people (and I’ve confirmed this with several people who are both frequent Grindr users and frequent flyers) so there’s no way the pilot messaged the passenger during the flight based on his location.
I don’t want to say the guy on Twitter is making this up, though something doesn’t add up: And since many people are suggesting that it’s irresponsible for the pilot to be using Grindr during the flight, I do think it’s fair to come to the supposed pilot’s defense here. I’m not suggesting anyone is lying, but rather I think at a minimum there may have been a misunderstanding here. I wouldn’t be writing about this, except the story has gone really viral, and I think there are a few inconsistencies here.
He said he would have met the pilot in retrospect.
When he landed in Nashville that day he decided to delete Grindr.
He then decided to message the guy (after deciding he needed to get off the plane as soon as possible), and said the pilot seemed like a “nice guy”.
When he saw this, his reaction was that he needed to get off the plane as fast as he could, because he has had some weird experiences with “proximity stuff” on Grindr.
Enjoy the ride to Chicago,” which he claims was sent 30 minutes before the plane landed
When the flight landed, he received a message from someone 90 feet away saying “I see you’re on my flight.
A 27 year old was traveling from Minneapolis to Chicago on Delta in August.
The New York Post has the story of what supposedly happened here: