Video of flight landing mishap predates 2024 US winter storms

"Chicago's O'Hare Airport canceled all flights after an American Airlines plane skidded off the runway during a massive snowstorm," says a January 12, 2024 post on X, formerly Twitter.

The post shows an airline passenger's footage of the aircraft skipping off a frosty runway as it landed, its right wing burying itself in snow.

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Screenshot from X taken January 18, 2024

Similar posts spread across X and other platforms, including Facebook and TikTok, as an arctic blast that blanketed parts of the United States with snow and freezing temperatures disrupted travel at the busy Chicago airport.

Thousands of flights were canceled daily across the country amid the storms, according to flightaware.com, and O'Hare airport closed temporarily in the early morning of January 12, AFP reported.

But the video circulating online is unrelated to the January 2024 flight cancellations -- and it is more than four years old.

"This video is indeed from 2019," said Ethan Klapper, a spokesperson for American Airlines, the carrier behind the November 11, 2019 flight that slid off the runway upon landing in Chicago from Greensboro, North Carolina (archived here).

Reverse image searches revealed the video featured in news reporting about the incident (archived here, here and here). It was credited to passenger Joseph Lian, who also captured footage after disembarking the aircraft (archived here and here).

According to a February 2023 report from the National Transportation Safety Board, the independent agency tasked by the US Congress with investigating major transportation accidents, the skid involving American Eagle flight 4125 saw the plane's right main landing gear collapse and was likely due to deteriorating weather conditions and a failure to close the slick runway, among other factors. It was the plane's second approach to the runway.

There were three crew members and 38 passengers aboard the flight, but no one was injured.

No similar incidents

The FAA reported January 14, 2024 that the left wingtip of an All Nippon Airways flight taxiing for departure at O'Hare airport clipped another aircraft belonging to Delta Air Lines (archived here).

But "there were no incidents involving an aircraft off a runway at Chicago O'Hare during the past week," Tony Molinaro, the agency's public affairs officer, told AFP in a January 17 email.

The Chicago Department of Aviation, which manages O'Hare and another city airport, added in a January 18 statement that "the video was not filmed at O'Hare in recent days, as there were no incidents like this one at the airport this month."