The pilot responsible for crashing a Delta plane upside down at the Toronto Pearson International Airport on February 17, 2025, has been identified as 26-year-old First Officer Kendal Swanson.
A beauty pageant winner from Minnesota, Swanson had only completed her training in April and had logged fewer than 1,500 flight hours at the time of the incident.
The more experienced captain, James Henneman, was managing communications during the crash while Swanson piloted.
No one should want to be put in a job they are not able to do. Swanson should not have wanted this and should have refused to attempt the landing, especially considering the stormy conditions. DEI fails at every level. And it especially fails at the level of the person who is promoted above their skill level. Swanson got lucky as no one died but the risk she took should be a warning to her for the rest of her life and to all of us that ideologies like DEI are not just stupid and wrong but extremely dangerous. Under Biden and his ilk we have been betting our entire nation and civilization on DEI. That kind of thinking must go. We will destroy USA and the West if we persist and then, even immigrants will have nowhere to go. ABN
UPDATE: Thanks to pimacanyon for providing the video below in his comment, which is well-worth reading. The video is a sort of rebuttal of my post above, which I am going to leave up since the public has a right to know what happened and if they don’t tell us even the basics, we are going to talk anyway. If Swanson didn’t land the plane, who did? If she was ‘qualified’ in some way or other, she was also only minimally experienced, so why did the pilot have her land the plane in such bad weather? I have seen a video analysis of the landing which claims whoever landed the plane failed to do a mandatory maneuver, which raises the plane’s nose, thus causing the aircraft to slam onto to the runway and overturn. When was the last time we saw a plane slam onto a runway and overturn like that? ABN
This is pure conjecture and is extremely unfair to the pilots. None of us knows what happened to cause this crash, and we won’t know until the TSB of Canada releases its preliminary report in a few weeks, and maybe we won’t know until the final report is released months or a year or more from now. Because of the conjecture and accusations that have been flying around social media, Delta has released a statement that makes it clear that both pilots had completed all training necessary, and had accumulated the flight hours necessary, to qualify as pilots for this aircraft.
Juan Brown is in my opinion the best commentator regarding recent airplane crashes. Juan was an Air Force pilot, then a commercial pilot flying long haul routes from the US to Europe, and US to Asia. His youtube channel is blancolirio. Here he talks about Delta’s statement and the what’s being said across social media. Worth a look in my opinion.
You make good points but why do we have to wait a year or more to find out what happened? I will post this video beneath my comments on this post but in an information vacuum, people are going to talk. I do understand the airlines fear lawsuits and so have gone quiet. But the silence looks bad and long investigations are always the excuse of governments and corporations wanting to delay consequences while they muddy the waters.
Delta has not gone silent. They posted a response to the speculation on social media.
We may not have to wait a year, but even if we do, as I said, we don’t know until the report comes out what caused the crash. As one pilot said in the comments on Juan Brown’s video, “Pilot’s are always assumed guilty until proven innocent.”
And finally, the lawsuits have already begun. Juan Brown mentions this on his latest video re this crash.
I did some looking and have not seen anything from Delta except to say pilots were ‘qualified’. The public should know who they were and what their training was and if the copilot landed the plane, why? If you have this info, please inform. Please see my update above for some other considerations.
I can understand why at this time Delta does not want to release the names of the pilots. However, as Delta said in their statement, both were fully qualified to fly the plane. The captain had nearly 2 decades of flying experience, so thousands of hours, and the first officer has been flying that airplane since April of last year. “Assertions that she failed her training events are false.”
Regarding why the first officer was landing the plane, this is something that is routinely done. Even though there is a captain and first officer, they are a team, and they switch roles. They may switch roles from one flight to the next, or may switch during a flight. The pilot flying is the one who is flying the plane. The other is the pilot monitoring. The captain may be the pilot flying and the first officer the pilot monitoring, or vice versa. This is routine and not something that’s unusual.
There are many possible reasons why this crash happened. First of all, that particular airplane has its engines mounted on the rear instead of under the wing like on the larger 737 or Airbus. Under wing engines obviously have their wings much higher off the ground (to give room for the engines) than rear engine mounts. So this airplane has its wingtips much closer to the ground than a 737 or Airbus, which means much less room for error in terms of having the wings slightly out of level when landing.
Why she didn’t flare could be due to blowing snow or a sudden gust or downdraft that put the plane closer to the ground than was apparent by the pilot. Total speculation on my part, but a pilot who has been flying these planes since April of last year certainly knows how to flare at landing and has done that many many times since April, so something must have happened to have caused the plane to hit the ground before the flare.
American Buddhist Net 
This is pure conjecture and is extremely unfair to the pilots. None of us knows what happened to cause this crash, and we won’t know until the TSB of Canada releases its preliminary report in a few weeks, and maybe we won’t know until the final report is released months or a year or more from now. Because of the conjecture and accusations that have been flying around social media, Delta has released a statement that makes it clear that both pilots had completed all training necessary, and had accumulated the flight hours necessary, to qualify as pilots for this aircraft.
Juan Brown is in my opinion the best commentator regarding recent airplane crashes. Juan was an Air Force pilot, then a commercial pilot flying long haul routes from the US to Europe, and US to Asia. His youtube channel is blancolirio. Here he talks about Delta’s statement and the what’s being said across social media. Worth a look in my opinion.
You make good points but why do we have to wait a year or more to find out what happened? I will post this video beneath my comments on this post but in an information vacuum, people are going to talk. I do understand the airlines fear lawsuits and so have gone quiet. But the silence looks bad and long investigations are always the excuse of governments and corporations wanting to delay consequences while they muddy the waters.
Thank you.
Delta has not gone silent. They posted a response to the speculation on social media.
We may not have to wait a year, but even if we do, as I said, we don’t know until the report comes out what caused the crash. As one pilot said in the comments on Juan Brown’s video, “Pilot’s are always assumed guilty until proven innocent.”
And finally, the lawsuits have already begun. Juan Brown mentions this on his latest video re this crash.
I did some looking and have not seen anything from Delta except to say pilots were ‘qualified’. The public should know who they were and what their training was and if the copilot landed the plane, why? If you have this info, please inform. Please see my update above for some other considerations.
Thank you again.
I can understand why at this time Delta does not want to release the names of the pilots. However, as Delta said in their statement, both were fully qualified to fly the plane. The captain had nearly 2 decades of flying experience, so thousands of hours, and the first officer has been flying that airplane since April of last year. “Assertions that she failed her training events are false.”
Regarding why the first officer was landing the plane, this is something that is routinely done. Even though there is a captain and first officer, they are a team, and they switch roles. They may switch roles from one flight to the next, or may switch during a flight. The pilot flying is the one who is flying the plane. The other is the pilot monitoring. The captain may be the pilot flying and the first officer the pilot monitoring, or vice versa. This is routine and not something that’s unusual.
There are many possible reasons why this crash happened. First of all, that particular airplane has its engines mounted on the rear instead of under the wing like on the larger 737 or Airbus. Under wing engines obviously have their wings much higher off the ground (to give room for the engines) than rear engine mounts. So this airplane has its wingtips much closer to the ground than a 737 or Airbus, which means much less room for error in terms of having the wings slightly out of level when landing.
Why she didn’t flare could be due to blowing snow or a sudden gust or downdraft that put the plane closer to the ground than was apparent by the pilot. Total speculation on my part, but a pilot who has been flying these planes since April of last year certainly knows how to flare at landing and has done that many many times since April, so something must have happened to have caused the plane to hit the ground before the flare.
Another point is this airline did a lot of bragging about DEI and promoting women over men. Here is just one example, easy to find more:
https://x.com/AZNsAgainstWoke/status/1892620148252553549