Max Comer can’t stop going viral.
He’s better known online as @airplanefactswithmax, an Instagram/TikTok account known for explanatory videos about airplane technology that unexpectedly pivot into factoid-laced summations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. They’re funny, they’re dry, and they provoke a frenzy of online activity. Across Instagram, TikTok, and the occasional Thread, he’s gathered around 1.3 million followers in two years, and that number keeps climbing. His Instagram Reels get 200,000 views and 300 comments when they don’t do well; his high-performing videos get over 38 million (that’s 38,000,000) views and 16,000 comments when they reach cruising velocity.
I’m an airplane mechanic, Max will say, staring into the iPhone camera, and this is an airplane fact with Max. He'll be in what seems to be the hangar bay of an airport, explaining to you the purpose of, say, a 787’s window. Something that makes these 787 windows a little different, he’ll say, is how they can fade to black at the touch of a button. And yet what makes this fading a little different than the fading that Frodo experienced after he was stabbed by a Nazgul on top of Weathertop in The Lord of the Rings—and here he’ll somehow avoid cracking a smile—is that this window actually doesn’t begin to fade because of the evils contained within the Morgul blade which was carried by the Witch King of Angmar which resulted in Frodo having to be carried on horseback by Glorfindel to Rivendell before—he must be nearly out of breath—they were eventually able to lose the pursuing Nazgul when they were swept away in the flooding at the Ford of Bruinen, but—and here he’ll pause—this 787 window darkens electronically, and I think this window shade is pretty cool, so … yep.
That’s the whole shtick. Max has made just over a hundred of these, and their success has made him a massively popular figure both in the airplane maintenance world—so much so that the Federal Aviation Administration had him on their podcast—and in the Lord of the Rings fandom—so much so that the Amazon Prime show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power flew him out to Comic-Con in 2024, just because. It’s possible that Max Comer is the biggest Lord of the Rings influencer on the internet. He’s also, as far as I can tell, the biggest influencer in Tulsa, period. Consider a massive Tulsa name like Hanson, with 500,000 followers; Max has them doubled and then some.
But he didn’t set out to become a viral sensation. He’s just a guy who loves Tolkien and works on airplanes for a living. In his house on the outskirts of Tulsa, where he lives with his two sons and two dogs, he shows me his battered copy of The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s collection of myths connecting the backstories of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, he admits, is one of the few things he reads lately. On his bookshelves are weightier titles: issues of Jacobin, The Color of Law, various histories of the United States. But that’s bookshelf stuff; not much other than fiction appeals to him lately.
Tolkien, obviously, is a repeat destination. He read Frank Herbert’s Dune last year, which he loved. Incredibly, he also read Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona, which he calls “this really horrible book,” from a recommendation. “I said, get that shit out of here. I went right back to Tolkien.”
He swears a surprising amount for someone whose claim to fame sounds like a children’s television show, but it’s only surprising until I remember that he’s an airplane mechanic. At six feet tall, he wears his curly hair past his shoulders and sports a thick mustache with a wide hill of red stubble under it. If you put a helmet on him, he’d look like an extra in the Rohirrim.