What was claimed
A video shows real footage from inside the Air India Flight 171 moments before the crash in Ahmedabad.
Our verdict
This isn’t true. The video is of an incident that occurred on a Ryanair flight from Bucharest to London Stansted in January 2020.
A video of smoke filling the cabin of an aeroplane and passengers screaming is being shared with false claims it was filmed moments before an Air India plane crashed in Ahmedabad on 12 June.
The clip (warning: distressing content) has been shared on Facebook with the caption: “Real footage from inside the Air India Flight 171 moments before the crash. You can hear the panic. The fear. The screams.”
In the footage, people can be heard screaming and crying as smoke fills the cabin.
Flight AI171 from Ahmedabad in India to London Gatwick crashed into a doctor’s hostel shortly after take off, killing all but one of the 242 passengers and crew on board as well as a number of people on the ground.
But the video being shared on social media is unrelated to the recent plane crash.
Full Fact has found the same video has been circulating on social media for several years.
A very similar video from a slightly different position appears on the website of a video licensing company, ViralHog, in March 2023 with the title “Plane Fills With Smoke After Takeoff”.
A description with the video states that it “Occurred on January 21, 2020” on a Ryanair flight from Bucharest in Romania. This video includes similar audio, and we also matched passengers on the plane in both this and the viral clip.
It was reported in January 2020 that a flight from Bucharest to London Stansted was forced to make an emergency landing after smoke flooded the cabin. Ryanair said in a statement that the smoke was believed to have been caused by “defrosting fluid in the air conditioning system” following a de-icing treatment.
Contemporaneous media reports also corroborate this incident, with similar videos of a smoke-filled cabin and people panicking being featured in the Metro, MailOnline, and the Daily Mirror.
The seat design also matches images of Ryanair cabins, and does not resemble the inside of an Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, the aircraft that crashed.
During unfolding news events, misinformation can spread quickly online. Before sharing content that you see on social media first consider whether it comes from a trustworthy and verified source. Our guides to identifying misleading videos can help you do this.
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 video is not from the recent Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad.
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