Fact check: Image claiming to show China Eastern crash is from a simulation
Claim: Image shows China Eastern Airlines plane in a nosedive
A Chinese Boeing 737-800 commercial passenger jet plunged almost 30,000 feet into a mountain jungle on March 21, exploding in a ball of flame in the province of Guangxi.
No survivors have been found among the 132 passengers and crew members aboard China Eastern Flight MU5735. It was China's first major airline crash since 2010, according to The New York Times.
A March 22 Facebook post captioned “#MU5735” purports to show an image of the plane barreling toward the ground without its tail.
“As seen on close up footage of the crash, vertical stabilizer – tail – of aircraft had been detached (sic),” text on the image reads.
The post accumulated more than 4,000 reactions and 1,600 shares in two days.
The tail section of the plane consists of the vertical and horizontal stabilizers, including the fin, rudder and elevators, which help to control the plane in flight.
But the image in the claim does not show the China Eastern crash. Instead it's a frame from a documentary's animated simulation of a 1997 plane crash. The investigation into the cause of Flight MU5735's crash is continuing.
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Paste BN reached out to the user who posted the claim for comment.
Image is from a video simulation of another plane crash
The image is a screenshot from an animated simulation video that can be viewed on YouTube.
The clip is originally from a documentary about the crash of SilkAir Flight MI185, which according to Singaporean database Infopedia crashed into a river in Indonesia while en route to Singapore in 1997. An investigation of Flight 185 showed that portions of the plane’s tail separated as it plunged downward due to its rapid descent. This is depicted in the simulation.
The plane in the image appears to be a different color than the China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed. In the post, what’s left of plane's tail appears turquoise, similar to the turquoise-and-navy design that adorned the planes of now-defunct SilkAir Airlines. The Boeing 737 that carried Flight MU5735, registered as China Eastern B-1791, was red, white and gold.
An investigation into the cause of Flight MU5735's crash is ongoing as of March 23.
Zhu Tao, director of aviation safety at the Civil Aviation Administration of China, has said the investigation will be difficult due to the fact that the aircraft “was severely damaged in this accident,” according to The New York Times.
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Our rating: False
Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that an image shows a China Eastern Airlines plane in a nosedive. The image is from an animated simulation video of the 1997 crash of a different airplane.
Our fact-check sources:
- China Daily Hong Kong, March 21, Plane carrying 132 crashes in south China
- Flight Safety Australia, February 2008, Final Flight: Silk Air
- Infopedia - National Library Board, Singapore, accessed March 23, Crash of SilkAir Flight MI 185
- Jetphotos.com, March 10, 2022, China Eastern Airlines B-1791
- Jetphotos.com, March 10, 2022, SilkAir #44240
- Monroe Aerospace, May 6, 2020, Horizontal vs vertical stabilizers in planes: What’s the difference?
- New York Times, March 23, What we know about the crash of China Easter Airlines Flight 5735
- New York Times, March 21, After China’s worst air crash in years, a desperate hunt for survivors
- On The Move, May 5, 2021, YouTube
- Plane’n Boom, Feb. 9, YouTube
- Paste BN, March 23, No survivors found among 132 people in China plane crash, Chinese state media says
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Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.