The video shared by a social media user from Cameroon shows a Thai Airlines plane circulating above an urban landscape as flames and smoke billow from its engines before landing on a beach.
The messages circulated after a plane crashed in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo on August 9, 2024, killing all 62 people on board (archived here).
Social media users have viewed the post more than 159,000 times, with several praising the pilot’s flying skills.
“Wow, the pilot is so great… good idea to land in the sea to save all the passengers of that plane, thank God (sic),” one user wrote.
But the claim that the video shows a plane crash in Brazil is false.
Video game footage
Several clues indicate that these images come from a computer game, Kilian Fichou’s video game correspondent told AFP.
“It definitely comes out of a video game, especially the modeling of the buildings and vegetation, [and] the camera movements,” he told AFP Fact Check.
Modeling refers to the way game designers shape objects in a video game so that they appear three-dimensional (filed here).
The “bird’s eye view” – or the perspective of a bird in flight – is a classic camera angle in video games, he added.
Thanks to several visual clues, AFP Fact Check was able to confirm which video game the images came from.
About 10 seconds into the Facebook footage, a building appears with a sign that says “Kayton” on it.
Using a keyword search for ‘Kayton video game’, AFP Fact Check discovered that the location is a fictional bank in Grand Theft Auto (archived here).
Additionally, the game features a plane crash storyline, of which there are dozens of videos online (archived here).
AFP debunked a similar claim shared in Tagalog, English, Spanish and Italian.
Plane crash in Brazil
Using a keyword search for ‘Brazil plane crash’, AFP Fact Check found video from news reports of the tragic August 9 incident (archived here).
Videos showed the ATR 72-500 plane in a downward spin before it crashed into a residential area in the city of Vinhedo, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Brazil’s financial capital Sao Paulo.
The plane, operated by airline Voepass, fell almost vertically, landed on its belly and exploded in flames, impacting with such force that it almost became “flattened,” Sao Paulo fire Lt. Olivia Perroni Cazo said.
The aircraft in the circulating video did not match the twin-propeller ATR 72-500 model, flown by Voepass, that crashed (archived here).
AFP Fact Check has published tips on spotting computer-generated videos of plane crashes, which you can read about here.
