Last Moments of Air India Express Flight? No, It’s a Simulation!

This is not actual video captured of the plane but a simulation of the last moments of its journey using real data.

A video of a flight crashing after landing is falsely going viral with the claim that it is a clip showing the last moments of the Air India Express flight which crashed in Kerala on Friday, 7 August. However, we found that this is not an actual video captured of the plane but a simulation of the last moments of its journey using real data.

CLAIM

The over five-minute long video is going viral in the aftermath of the incident on Friday when an Air India Express flight (IX-1344) crashed at Kozhikode airport in Kerala.

The video has information such as blow-by-blow details of what is happening with the plane, shots of the plane in the sky, from inside the cockpit, weather information and then finally shots of the plane landing and falling into the valley. At the end of the video we can see photos from the site of the crash well.

The video was uploaded on a page called ‘Only Men Group’ on 9 August and in less than 20 hours, it has garnered over 16,000 views.

We also found people sharing the post on Twitter and YouTube. On YouTube, the video had over 6,000 views.

WHAT WE FOUND

We ran a keyword search on YouTube and came across the same video uploaded by a channel called MPC Flight Recreations on 7 August. One look at the description of the video shows that it is a video simulation with real data of the Air India Express flight 1344.

Therefore, unlike how people are sharing the video with the claim that it is real footage of the plane, it is actually a simulation, a computer generated recreation of how the crash happened using data available publicly. Looking at the video also makes it evident that it is not real footage of the aircraft before the crash.

The video also mentioned the term P3D, which we found stands for Prepar3D, a visual simulation platform created by Lockheed Martin that allows users to create training scenarios across aviation, maritime and ground domains.

The flight from Dubai was carrying 190 people, including a six-member crew. It overshot the tabletop runway during landing at the Kozhikode airport in heavy rain on Friday night, fell into a valley 35 feet below and broke into two, killing 18 people, including the pilots. While the probe into the crash is underway, the airline said as on Monday that 56 injured passengers have been discharged.

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