Nancy's Notes

Last night I saw the first reports about Air Canada Jazz Flight 8626 from Montreal to New York and its collision with an emergency vehicle at LaGuardia, and before anyone knew a damn thing, the comments had already started. DEI hires. Of course. Because apparently this is where we are now. In the middle of shock, injury, terror, and those first awful hours when people are still trying to understand what happened, some people’s first instinct is not concern. It is blame, assigned by race, accent, religion, or whatever else they have decided counts as “other.”

I was mad as hell.

Aviation has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, there was a very good chance that if I boarded an Air Canada flight, I knew one of the pilots up front. Later, as that generation retired, I often knew the next wave too. That direct connection is not what it once was, and many of those people are gone now, but the aviation community is still stitched deeply into who I am. When something happens in that world, I do not take it in like some random headline and move on.

I have lost too many people to aviation in my life to look at something like this casually. Too many. Enough to know that when an aircraft is damaged and lives are on the line, the first response should be humanity. Not ideology. Not social media garbage. Not that now familiar rush to find somebody who looks different, sounds different, worships differently, and pin the whole thing on them before we even know the first real thing.

And yes, at this point the blame being tossed around seems to be leaning more toward air traffic control than toward the pilots. That does not make the pile-on any smarter. Air traffic control is not some easy fallback theory for people who want an answer before there is one. It is one of the toughest disciplines in aviation. The training is demanding, the standards are high, and not everyone who starts makes it through, because the work requires extraordinary focus, judgment, and calm under pressure. Whether there was an error there or anywhere else is for investigators to determine. It is not for people online to decide five minutes in because they are angry and need someone to pin it on.

We do not know enough yet. We do not know what happened in that cockpit. We do not know what happened with the emergency vehicle. We do not know what was said, what was missed, what was seen too late, whether there was miscommunication, fatigue, procedural breakdown, traffic pressure, or some combination of things that only a real investigation will sort out.

Being a pilot is not easy. Air traffic control is not easy. None of this is easy, and that is exactly why people should stop acting like they know everything before the facts are even in.

And let’s be blunt about something else. When the front of an aircraft is torn apart, there were human beings in those seats facing seconds none of us should casually narrate from behind a phone screen. Pilots, crew, passengers, and emergency personnel. Real people. Real fear. Real consequences.

So no, this is not the moment for your lazy, ugly little theories about diversity. This is the moment for restraint, for decency, and for remembering that aviation incidents are investigated with evidence, not with prejudice.

For God’s sake, can we still be human first?