The tragedy that entailed around the PIA plane crash in Pakistan is engulfed in the dust of fake news. Traditionally, misinformation surrounding current events is widely circulated on social media platforms and messaging groups, which only create panic and shock. In the case of PIA plane crash, "horrific footage" claiming to be from inside the aircraft during the crash is making the rounds on the internet.

Video from inside PIA plane

In the video, we can see passengers panic and get thrown in the air from their assigned before the footage goes black. The video is titled "The horrific footage of PIA passenger jet that crushed along with 90 passengers in Pakistan." The video has gone viral since, but there's no truth to it.

Fact-check

International Business Times, India was notified of this viral video. At first inspection, it was clear that the video was not from inside of an airline. In fact, the seats, curtains, and the position of the CCTV camera pointing at the passengers are clear elements that the video is not from PIA passenger plane.

Viral video is fake
Viral video is fake

The PIA plane was an Airbus A320. Here are the major giveaways to the video being wrongly attributed to the PIA crash:

  • No passenger jet has curtains
  • There's no direct window view of the front
  • The seats are of a bus, not an aircraft
  • No A320 jet has a camera at the angle where this video was shot. There's one at the entrance of the cockpit.
  • There's no way to recover the footage of the internal CCTV, the black box only stores technical data and comms
  • The timestamp has been blocked to show the original date and time of the accident

With this, we dug further to trace the original video and it was of a bus accident from September 2019. The video is from inside the bus, which toppled after the tires were flat on a highway connecting Lahore to Islamabad in Pakistan. A local newspaper had also covered the accident in October and had highlighted the importance of wearing a seat belt. A simple web search on Google for "Faisal Mover bus accident" will give you the results of this seven-month-old video.

Claim reviewed :

PIA plane crash video showing passengers

Fact Check :

Misleading