Airline Pilot Used Grindr To Message Flight Passenger From Cockpit

In a not-so-common occurrence, a Delta Air Lines pilot hit on a passenger on Grindr while he was flying the plane.

The incident happened in August, when JP Thorn, 27, a student of communications at Hamline University was flying from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Chicago. After he landed at his destination and turned off flight mode on his phone, Thorn found a new message on Grindr that surprised him.

“I see you’re on my flight,” the message read. “Enjoy the ride to Chicago.”

His instincts, along with a number of indications like the sender’s profile picture featured a snapshot of the sky taken from the cockpit and the app detected the man 90 feet away from him, made him conclude the plane’s pilot had sent him the message.

“My deductive reasoning led me to believe that he was the pilot,” Thorn told The New York Post. “I messaged him back and he told me that he was one of the pilots.”

More importantly, Thorn said he received the message half an hour before the flight landed, which meant the pilot had sent it while still flying the aircraft. This, coupled with the fact that he did not have the best of experiences using the gay dating app, made Thorn anxious.

“My reaction was I knew I needed to get off this plane as fast as I can,” he said. “I’ve had some weird experiences with proximity stuff on Grindr.”

Nevertheless, Thorn did reply to the pilot and they continued to chat as the former waited for his connecting flight to Nashville, Tennessee, given that his worries disappeared once he exited the first flight. After a few exchanges, the 27-year-old said he found the pilot was a “nice man.”

“He asked me about our flight, how it was on the way, and [the conversation] was really standard,” Thorn said. “I said there was no turbulence, then he made a joke about turbulence,” Thorn said.

After he uploaded a screenshot of the conversation on Twitter, Thorn said many social media users encouraged him to give dating the pilot a shot.

“I got a lot of people saying I should’ve met up with pilots because they make a lot of money,” he said. “That was pretty funny.”

He added that if he did not have to catch his connecting flight, he would have asked out the aviator. However, he did not get a chance to do so and will probably never get an opportunity any time soon because he deleted the app once he landed at his second destination.

“I meet up with people all the time from Grindr,” Thorn said. “I think I totally would have met him for coffee.”

When asked if he would fly with Delta again, Thorn answered in the affirmative, adding it was the airlines he mostly booked. “I don’t think they get into too much controversy,” he said.