Pilots Keep On Making Special Announcements They Are Flying Over The Gulf Of America But Passengers Wonder Whether It’s One Big Political Stunt

One of the very first acts that President Trump performed on his first day back in office was to sign an executive order that renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America – an act that Trump said was in the national interest but that was derided on the international stage.

In fact, despite Trump’s claims that the Gulf is an “indelible part of America,” the vast majority of Americans don’t back the decision, with various polls showing that the renaming remains an unpopular move.

One poll from the Marquette Law School found that 71% of Americans opposed renaming the Gulf of Mexico, while the controversial decision was only favored by 29%. A second poll by Reuters/Ipsos had a similar response, with 70% opposing the change and only 25% supporting the renaming.

Despite that lack of support, however, airline passengers and even flight attendants have noticed a new trend… a growing number of pilots seemingly can’t help but provide mid-flight updates with their routing on flights traversing the Gulf, giving them the perfect opportunity to name check the Gulf of America.

The question is, however, whether pilots genuinely want to keep passengers informed on the progress of the flight and the route they are flying, or are they deliberately making a political statement?

“Pilot just came on telling us we’d be flying over the Gulf of America (unironic). I’m now concerned about his mental well-being,” one recent Southwest passenger noted on the popular social media platform Reddit.

One commentator purporting to be a pilot for the carrier responded: “At Southwest Airlines, we call it the Gulf of America, its official name. Don’t fly with us if you don’t like it, liberal. We’re a real American airline.”

Flight attendants have also been sharing their own anecdotes of pilots making mid-flight announcements in what they believe was a deliberate attempt to check the Gulf of America.

It seems as if pilots are more on the side of the name change, while flight attendants are (like most Americans) opposed to calling it the Gulf of America.

“I have never heard an FA [flight attendant] announce that ‘while we are flying over (any zone), your Wi-Fi may be spotty’. But this cute little fella on UA1528 TPA [Tampa] to IAH [Houston] just worked it in so he could say the ‘Gulf of MEXICO’ several times,” someone else noted on Reddit.

At a national level, the U.S. Geological Survey and Geographic Names Information System quickly complied with Trump’s executive order and renamed the Gulf to the Gulf of America, although from an aviation standpoint, the naming convention for the Gulf is trickier.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) still calls it the Gulf of Mexico, much like the rest of the world.

Earlier this month, a Frontier Airlines Captain was pictured wearing a bright red baseball cap with TRUMP emblazoned across the front while standing at the front of the plane in full of passengers.

Gary Leff from the View from the Wing blog noted the incident as further proof that US pilots generally tend to “skew conservative.” In one incident in 2021, Southwest opened an internal investigation into a pilot who reportedly signed off a passenger announcement with the controversial “Let’s go Brandon” phrase.

A year later, another Southwest pilot was pictured with a politically-motivated slogan sticker slapped on his crew bag, which read: “I used to be liberal. Then I left home & got a job”.