Over the weekend it was snowy in Munich, and at the airport, an unfueled, parked aircraft froze over. Someone posted the footage of it online. Because of the weight of the snow in the tail, the plane tipped upwards, and as a result, it appeared as though the plane was flash-frozen on the runway just as its front end was taking off.
Enter Ryan Maue, a weather map expert whose dishonesty was so brazen that even the notoriously fact-adverse Trump White House kicked him out. He quote-tweeted the video of the frozen jet with some extra context.
Following the lead of other Twitter trolls, Maue decided to add his own evidence-free caption to the clip: "Private jets in Munich on the way to Dubai global warming conference are literally frozen on the runway, which has turned into a glacier."
Fortunately, the post was fact checked by the (usually unreliable) community notes feature, with a note pointing out that the plane "was not frozen to the runway, nor was it on the way to Dubai." In fact, according to evidence from a flight-tracking website, it "was parked, with no scheduled flight activity for the past 14 days as of December 3, 2023."
To explain the dramatic angle of the plane, the community note explained that "an unfueled parked aircraft, with heavy snow on its tail section may tip rearward."
Maue's post has 6.7M views, according to Twitter’s/X’s metrics. This tweet and the many other posts of this nature across social media likely gained traction because they combined two common disinformation narratives: the winter weather fallacy, which falsely claims that global warming can’t be happening if there is cold weather, and the private jets-focused climate hypocrisy rhetoric, which seeks to delegitimize climate action by pointing out climate leaders’ unsustainable behavior and wrongly implying that climate action only benefits the rich.
Maue has yet to acknowledge that the jet he claimed was frozen to the runway as it was attempting to fly to Dubai wasn't on its way anywhere, wasn't on the runway, and wasn't even fueled up.
But other than that, great job, Ryan!
