No, these two videos don’t show the recent deadly plane crash in Nepal

If you only have a minute:

• At least two videos claiming to show a plane crash in Nepal on January 15, 2023 have been circulating online. However, in reality, these old videos show different crashes entirely. 

• One of these videos has been retweeted at least 900 times. However, it turns out that it is actually a video of the crash of an American transport plane in Afghanistan back in April 2013. 

• The other video, which has been shared more than 2,000 times, actually shows a military plane that crashed in Russia in August 2021. 

The fact check, in detail 

At least 71 people died on Sunday, January 15, 2023, when a plane belonging to Yeti Airlines crashed in Nepal. The plane, which had taken off from the capital, Kathmandu, crashed near Pokhara, in the centre of Nepal, where it was supposed to land. Search and rescue workers are still hunting for the 72nd passenger, even though local authorities say they have no hope of finding the person alive. 

Shortly after the crash – the most deadly in Nepal since 1992 – a number of videos said to show the plane going down were shared on social media. However, some of these videos show different crashes entirely. 

The crash of an American plane in Afghanistan

A video showing an airplane brutally plunging downwards before crashing in a burst of flame started circulating on January 15, 2023. The post said the video showed the Nepal crash.

The video appears in this post in English and in Hindi, and has been shared more than 900 times. 

This video actually doesn’t have anything to do with the recent crash in Nepal, as you can tell from carrying out a reverse image search (click here to find out how). 

We did a reverse image search on the footage and discovered that the same video was actually published on May 1, 2013 on The Guardian. The video shows an American Boeing 747 cargo plane crashing on April 29, 2013 after taking off from Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

The accident killed all seven people who were in the plane, which was carrying 200 tonnes of cargo.

An investigation carried out by the National Transportation Safety Board revealed the accident occurred when some cargo suddenly shifted towards the back of the plane.  

This made it impossible for the pilot to control the plane, as news agency the Associated Press reported in July 2015.

A video filmed in Russia in 2021

This isn’t the only video that has been falsely linked to the recent crash in Nepal. This post from January 16, 2023 featuring a video of a plane crash was shared more than 2,000 times.

The video shows a plane catching fire before crashing into a wooded area.

In this case, we found the original video by carrying out a reverse image search on the Russian search engine Yandex.

It turns out, the video was featured in a post shared on August 17, 2021 on VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. The caption explains that the video shows the “crash of military transport aircraft Il-112V during a training flight".

Several news agencies reported on the Russian crash on August 17, 2021, including the Associated Press. The AP article features several screengrabs of the video in question. 

The crash occurred near the Kubinka aerodrome, located about 25 kilometres west of Moscow. Both pilots were killed, as well as an engineer who was also on the plane. 

The plane was a prototype of a lightweight military transport aircraft called Ilyushin IL-112V, the first of its kind developed in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The plane was being tested when the crash occurred. 

Indian media outlet India Today demonstrated that it is possible to geolocate the video and confirm that it was filmed near Kubinka, Russia. 

Moreover, the plane in the video isn’t an ATR-72, the type of plane that crashed in Nepal. It looks a lot more like an IL-112V, the kind of plane that crashed in Russia – a clue highlighted by the Twitter account RandomOSINT.