Simulated 'aeroplane crash' clip misleads Philippines Facebook users

Published on January 19, 2025 at 07:44
3 min read
By Lucille SODIPE, AFP Philippines

Following deadly plane crashes in Kazakhstan and South Korea at the end of December 2024, a clip from a flight simulator has racked up more than one million views in social media posts that falsely claimed it showed a real passenger jet crash-landing. The user who originally uploaded the clip in February 2024 told AFP it was made using the X-Plane 12 simulator.

"December 2024. So many aeroplane crashes, many people died," reads part of the Tagalog-language text superimposed on a Facebook reel shared on January 3, 2025. "Good thing they landed safely."

Viewed over 1.2 million times, the clip purportedly shows a plane with Air France livery skidding as it lands, almost flipping and bouncing before it comes to a stop. The plane does not appear to sustain any structural damage.

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on January 8, 2025

The clip was also shared elsewhere on Facebook here, here, here and here, with comments on the posts indicating some users believed it showed a genuine crash.

"Thank you Lord, the passengers are safe," wrote one user, while another said: "Pray always when travelling."

The clip circulated after two deadly plane crashes in late December, 2024.

On December 25, an Azerbaijan Airlines jet crashed in Kazakhstan after being diverted from a scheduled landing in the Chechen capital Grozny in southern Russia, killing 38 of the 67 people on board (archived link).

Azerbaijan believes the plane was shot down by Russian air defences, and while Moscow said its air defences were working at the time repelling Ukrainian drones, it has stopped short of saying it shot at the plane.

Days later, a Jeju Air flight flying from Thailand to Muan, South Korea belly-landed at the Muan airport and exploded in a fireball after slamming into a concrete barrier (archived link).

The disaster -- the worst ever on South Korean soil -- left 179 people dead.

Flight simulator

There were no official reports, however, of an Air France aircraft crash-landing in December 2024.

A closer analysis of the footage shows inconsistencies with how the plane interacts with the runway and surrounding area.

For example, at several points in the clip, the plane's engines appear to go through the runway without causing any damage to either the aircraft or the runway.

Screenshot from the circulating video appears to show the plane's engines clipping through the runway without being damaged

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared video led to a higher-quality version of the same clip posted on TikTok by the account "danny106_" (archived link).

The account's description said they post about "Military activity, and flight simulators".

The clip, which has more than 248 million views, was posted on February 10, 2024 and filed under a playlist titled "Video Games", which contains hundreds of similar flight simulator videos (archived link).

Below is a screenshot of the falsely shared video (left) and the clip posted on TikTok (right):

Screenshot of the falsely shared video (left) and the clip posted on TikTok (right)

The TikTok user told AFP that they created the clip using the flight simulator "X-Plane 12" (archived link).

"In my Tik Tok account I always say if the video is real or a simulator... there are unscrupulous users who have tried to fake some of my videos," they said on January 16, 2025.

Dramatic footage of plane crashes created by flight simulator software often gets misleadingly shared as genuine on social media after genuine accidents.

AFP has previously debunked such claims here and here, and put together this guide to spotting the difference between real footage and simulations.

Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.

E-mail