About

Air India Flight 121 refers to the exploitable meme frame referring to the supposed flight path of Air India Flight 121 over Ukrainian airspace on February 24th, 2022. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all commercial flights were redirected away from Ukrainian airspace on February 23rd^[1] to avoid the active warzone and a tragedy similar to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 which was shot down in 2014 over Ukraine.

Origin

On February 24, 2022, Twitter user QuebecTango posted on Twitter a screenshot of the supposed flight path of Air India Flight 121 on its way into Ukrainian airspace despite all other planes clearly making an effort to avoid the airspace and referred to the infamous World of Warcraft meme, Leeory Jenkins ^[4]. It earned 12.9k Retweets and 99.1k Likes in about a week^[4] (Shown Below).

QuebecTango would later clarify later in Tweets on the 24th and 25th that the flight path had been a result of a glitch and was not altered^[5][6].

Nevertheless, the meme was born.

Spread

After Twitter user QuebecTango’s original Tweet, several other iterations of the Leeroy Jenkins caption reappeared as with Tweets by Twitter users YourAnonNews and sc23cc^[3].

New iterations of the meme began to emerge on the same day with memes about the price of fuel, lack of care about passengers, refusal to change course. Moreover, several other memes were combined with Air India Flight 121 such as Dio Brando from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, the “Daily Struggle” meme, and the Robotnik Pressing Red Button meme .

The meme has found itself repurposed as a Pro-Modi and Pro-Indian Government memes on Facebook as noted by Alt News^[2].

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References

^[1] CNBC – “Ukraine closes airspace to civilian flights citing ‘high risk’” / Posted on 2-23-22

^[2] Alt News – "Air India flight in war-torn Ukraine? No. Misinfo believed to be true" / Posted on 2-28-22

^[3] Know Your Meme – "An Air India Flight Map Shows A Plane Flying Over Ukraine Despite Every Other Commerical Pilot Avoiding The Airspace" Posted on 2-25-22

^[4] Twitter – @QuebecTango

^[5] Twitter – @QuebecTango

^[6] Twitter – @QuebecTango