Jessica Leeds claimed that in the early 1980s she was on a flight to New York and was upgraded into an empty first class seat next to Donald Trump. She says Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her inappropriately (“He was like an octopus”).

Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson went on television and invoked ‘the aviation defense’ where she just starts naming older aircraft models. Bizarrely she suggests that L-1011s and DC-10s didn’t fly to New York, so we don’t have to look at those aircraft. And first class armrests don’t move.

THE AVIATION DEFENSE BY KATRINA PIERSON!!! pic.twitter.com/iKXEBY2dTW — sam esfandiari (@samesfandiari) October 13, 2016

Put another way…

Now I didn’t start flying first class regularly until the mid- to late-90s. I grew up in New York in the 70s and 80s, and flew frequently, but always in coach. (My earliest memory is of a car service to the airport before a TWA flight.)

However @ParkeBench went on a tweetstorm.

With proof that there were L-1011s and DC-10s with movable armrests, Pierson’s argument rests entirely on the notion that neither aircraft type served the New York market.

Except that the original L-1011 concept came out of discussions between American Airlines and Lockheed for a plane that would fly transatlantic from New York (and Dallas) and the inaugural commercial flight of the L-1011 was Eastern Airlines Miami – New York. TWA had significant New York operations with L-1011s and even had a famous crash, flight 843 to San Francisco, where all passengers were safely evacuated but the plane was lost to fire.

And while we’re on the subject of out of left field theories, here’s a report of a DC-10 spotting a UFO over… New York.

We rate Pierson’s argument false.

(HT: @pir8z40)