Video shows flight simulator game, not Chinese airliner crash

CLAIM » Video shows Boeing 737 crash in southern China.

THE FACTS » The footage is computer generated, and was created using a flight simulator game. A China Eastern Boeing 737-800 with 132 people on board crashed in a remote mountainous area of southern China on Monday, setting off a forest fire, according to the country’s aviation officials. Following the crash, Twitter users began sharing a video game clip of a plane plummeting from the sky, falsely claiming it showed the China Eastern crash. The footage takes the point of view from a window seat, from which a red, yellow and green Ethiopian Airlines logo can be seen on the plane’s wing. Screams can be heard in the background. “A Boeing 737 just crashed in southern China. This was one of the last moment recorded on the plane. maybe the only moment. Viewers’ discretion advised,” stated one widely-shared Twitter post with the video. The video circulating on social media is identical to a portion of a longer clip posted to YouTube on March 10, 2019. That post states that the footage was made from the flight simulator game X-Plane 11, as an attempt to recreate how an Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed after takeoff in March 2019. “This is only a simulated flight crash for Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302,” the video’s caption states. In the longer clip, graphics such as the clouds and landscape are clearly computer generated. The plane’s interior also matches video and screenshots of the Boeing 737-800 simulation from X-Plane 11’s website. The 10-minute clip on YouTube shows the aircraft taking off and ends with the plane falling from the sky. The video notes that the screams were edited into the flight simulator footage: “This sound is added while editing, so this is not implemented from the simulator,” an onscreen caption states. The creator of X-Plane 11 did not immediately return a request for comment.