Fact File: Posts misidentify pilot involved in fatal Air Canada crash

Multiple social media posts this week paid tribute to the two pilots who died in a collision between an Air Canada plane and a firefighting truck at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. But in some of the posts, photos purporting to show one of the pilots were actually images of people unconnected to the crash.

Some posts included images of a woman and identified her as one of the pilots who died, Mackenzie Gunther. Others identified a man wearing a tie as Gunther. The posts are false. The images of the woman identified as Gunther appear to be AI-generated recreations of someone who shares the same name with the pilot, who was male. The photo of the man in a tie appears to be someone who attended the same flight school as Gunther.

THE CLAIM

Sunday’s fatal crash between Air Canada Express Flight 8646 and a firefighting truck on the runway at LaGuardia claimed the lives of two pilots, Gunther and Antoine Forest.

As media reports about the identity of the flight crew started to circulate, social media posts memorializing the victims appeared online. Some of the posts seemed to include real photos, while others looked AI-generated.

An AI-generated image posted to X claimed to show “Captain Antoine Forest & First Officer Mackenzie Gunther.” The image shows a man who looks similar to Forest and a smiling blond woman with glasses. Similar images of the woman identified as Gunther appeared in Instagram and Facebook posts memorializing the pilots. 

Other posts
claimed Gunther was a man pictured standing in front of a small aircraft in a long-sleeved white shirt and black tie.

THE FACTS

The Canadian Press confirmed the identities of the pilots through social media posts from Forest’s brother and from Seneca Polytechnic, where Gunther studied aviation technology. 

Quebec’s forest fire prevention service SOPFEU shared a photo of Forest on Facebook and said he was a former employee.

Seneca Polytechnic did not release a photo of Gunther in its post acknowledging his death. However, a reverse image search of the man in the tie identified as Gunther in many social media posts shows the photo comes from a Seneca newsletter published in 2021.

The newsletter said its school of aviation “managed to train two students Mackenzie Gunther and Spencer Dyce (pictured right)” and that they had completed their private pilot licences. The accompanying photo shows a man in a tie fist-bumping another man in front of a light aircraft on the tarmac.

The newsletter’s wording could be read as suggesting that Gunther is the pilot in the tie, but Seneca Polytechnic’s communications director Cam Gordon said in a phone call Wednesday that Gunther is not in the photo. Gordon added that the school has not shared any photos of Gunther since the crash.

 A Google image search of Dyce’s name shows a person who looks similar to the man in the tie in the newsletter photo.

As for the woman identified as Gunther in some posts, a Google search of “Mackenzie Gunther” brings up social media pages of a woman with the same name as the pilot. 

The social media photos of the female Mackenzie Gunther bear resemblance to the images identifying her as the pilot. Those images appear to be AI-generated recreations of the real, but unrelated woman.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 25, 2026.