The reports circulated after a plane crashed in the Brazilian state of São Paulo on August 9, 2024, killing all 62 people on board (archived link).
Video footage showed the ATR 72-500 plane entering a horrific downward spin before crashing into a residential area in the city of Vinhedo, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of Brazil’s financial capital Sao Paulo.
The Voepass airliner crashed almost vertically, landing on its belly and exploding in flames, hitting the ground with such force that it was almost “crushed,” according to Olivia Perroni Cazo, a Sao Paulo firefighter lieutenant.
Video game
A reverse Google search found an earlier version of the video uploaded by TikTok user @fly_zone77 on August 10, 2024.
The video was captioned: “Moments before the plane crash in Brazil.”
However, the TikTok user’s profile indicated that the account posts clips from the action-adventure video game Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5) (archived link).
One of the features of the video game is the simulation of plane crashes (archived link).
The TikTok account regularly posts other animated videos of plane crashes.
AFP also discovered that the plane seen in the circulating video does not match the Voepass twin-propeller ATR 72-500 model that crashed in Brazil (archived link).
Below is a screenshot of a comparison between the fake video (left) and the official photo of the ATR72-500 aircraft (right), with elements highlighted by AFP:
Witness videos of the incident – reported by Spanish television network Noticias Telemundo and Argentine newspaper Clarin – show the plane flying down with no visible signs of fire before it crashed (archived links here and here).
AFP has published tips on how to identify computer-generated videos of plane crashes.
