What was claimed
An image of an aeroplane which has flown into the side of a road bridge shows a “horrific plane crash”.
Our verdict
This isn’t a real plane crash. It is actually a piece of digital art.
Image of plane crashing into bridge is digital art not real disaster
2 December 2024
A dramatic image of an aeroplane crashing into a bridge is being shared online with misleading claims that it shows a real disaster.
It appears to show a passenger plane which has flown into the side of a large bridge on which cars are travelling, and the beginning of a fire or explosion involving cars where a wing has hit the road.
But the picture, which is circulating on X (formerly Twitter) and also on Facebook, with captions claiming it is a “real life scenario”, which is part of a thread of “horrific plane crashes caught on camera”, does not depict a real event.
It is actually a piece of digital art by a Canadian graphic designer Steve McGhee.
He produces work that depicts catastrophic events, including plane crashes, cities being wiped out by tsunamis and post-apocalyptic scenes.
The image of a plane crashing into a bridge was included in a feature on his work published by a news outlet in 2015, and has been included in blog compilations of photo manipulations and digital art going back to 2009.
We have previously fact checked a number of art pieces that have been misinterpreted as genuine, including a photo of a woman in a fluorescent face and body veil which was falsely claimed to be of a new lollipop lady in Birmingham and a video of a piece of activist art, which was claimed to show a ‘Palestinian baby’ doll made in Israel.
We’ve written a guide on how to fact check misleading images.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the image isn’t of a real plane crash, but a piece of digital art.