After a London-bound Air India flight crashed just outside the Ahmedabad airport on 12 June, claiming 241 lives, social media users shared visuals of the tragedy across platforms.
Claim: Those sharing a range of photographs claimed to show visuals of the devastating crash.
(Archived versions of more posts sharing these images can be seen here, here, and here.)
But...?: All three images are old and are not related to the Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad.
One of them shows a fatal plane crash in South Korea in December 2024.
The other two show plane crashes at Kerala's Kozhikode airport, where a plane skidded off the runway in August 2020.
How do we know?: We ran reverse image searches using TinEye and Google Lens for the photos which looked unrelated in each of the posts.
Photo 1
A reverse image search on this image led us to stock photo website Alamy.
They had shared this photo on 29 December 2024 as one of a passenger plane which crashed at South Korea's Muan International Airport.
The photo was also included in a CNN photo story about the crash, which noted that Jeju Air's flight 7C 2216, carrying 181 people on board, had crash-landed in Muan.
An Economic Times report, which also carried a similar photo of the crash, mentioned that 179 out of 181 people on board had died, marking South Korea's deadliest air crash in 20 years.
Photo 2
We used Google Lens to look for details about this photograph.
The search led us to a New York Times report, with the same photograph, which was published on 8 August 2020.
It said that the photo was of an Air India Express flight that "skidded off the runway and down a hill" after landing at Kerala's Kozhikode airport.
The Quint had also reported on this crash, using a cropped version of the viral photo in its story about the plane crash which took place on 7 August 2020, claiming 18 lives out of the 190 on board, including both pilots.
After the crash, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) banned the use of wide-body aircrafts at Kozhikode airport during monsoons, because of the dangers its tabletop runway posed.
Photo 3
During our search for the previous image, we noticed that the third photo shared in the claim was also from the same Kozhikode airport crash on 7 August 2020.
The Quint had shared this image in another report about the crash, mentioning that the flight data and cockpit voice recorder of the inbound flight from Dubai was found.
The then-Union Minister of State of Civil Aviation, Hardeep Singh Puri had also shared this photo in a post on his official X (formerly Twitter) account a day after the crash.
A short video report on the 2020 Kozhikode crash can be seen here.
Conclusion: Old, unrelated images of plane crashes in Muan, South Korea and Kerala have been falsely linked to the Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad.
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