Images misidentify deceased Air Canada pilot
- Published on March 31, 2026 at 23:10
- 2 min read
- Translation and adaptation AFP Canada
Two pilots were killed and dozens of people injured when an Air Canada plane collided with a fire truck on a runway at New York's LaGuardia airport. But the outpouring of social media tributes that followed the deadly incident included an AI-generated image that falsely depicted the two young aviators who died in the cockpit and incorrectly identified one as a woman.
"Today we remember Captain Antoine Forest and First Officer Mackenzie Gunther," said a March 24, 2026 Threads post sharing an image of a man and woman smiling in commercial pilot uniforms.
The image spread across Instagram, Facebook and X as creators rushed to post about the March 22 crash at New York's LaGuardia airport involving Jazz Aviation crew members operating as Air Canada Express.
The arriving aircraft struck a fire truck a traffic controller had cleared to cross the runway moments earlier and then urgently ordered to halt. The accident paused flights, with the jet left tilted back onto its tail, its cockpit smashed.
The pilots, who were the only people to die in the crash, were identified as Antoine Forest and Mackenzie Gunther.
But the image circulating across social media is an AI-generated fake that depicts Gunther, a man, as a woman.
An authentic photo of Forest quickly surfaced and was verified after his brother Cédric tagged his Facebook account in a Mach 23 post paying tribute to him (archived here and here). Quebec's forest fire prevention service SOPFEU shared the same image, writing on Facebook that Forest was a former employee (archived here).
News organizations later verified an image of Gunther -- sporting a beard and moustache -- by contacting his friends.
AI creation
Keyword searches on Facebook surfaced one post sharing the AI-generated image where a sparkle -- the watermark automatically applied to images generated by Google's Gemini AI -- is visible in the lower right corner.
The image also has slight distortions -- including the way the woman's glasses sit on her face -- that indicate the use of AI.
The epaulettes, or stripes on the shoulders of the pilot uniforms, also appear melted into the fabric, another element common in AI-generated imagery.
The fake image may have been based on pictures of a woman also named Mackenzie Gunther, LinkedIn searches revealed (archived here). But AFP could not confirm the original prompt used to generate it.
The Canadian Press debunked additional posts erroneously depicting Gunther as another man who attended the same aviation school.
Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation in Canada here.
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