By Vansh Shah

On January 15, 2023, a Yeti Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Pokhara in Nepal crashed on the banks of the Seti Gandaki river near the Pokhara International airport. As reported by The Guardian, at least 68 people lost their lives in the disaster.

In the context of this tragedy, a video has been circulating on social media of an aircraft catching fire mid-air and crashing in the woods. Users have claimed this video to be of the recent plane crash in Pokhara, Nepal.

Twitter handle @India_To_Today shared the video claiming it to be the Yeti airline plane crash. This tweet had over 6000 views at the time of the writing of this article.

https://twitter.com/India_To_Today/status/1614847201557245954?t=q4sIxUCw8VTvHYEMjGpjmg&s=19

User @UmaShankar2054 shared the video with the same claim. The video has over 300 views.

https://twitter.com/UmaShankar2054/status/1615324339842469889?t=odk6_8GPdJN4lDOuflyyDg&s=19

Alt News has also received a request on its Whatsapp helpline (+91 76000 11160) for the verification of the clip.

Fact Check

We broke down the video into key-frames using InVid and then performed a reverse image search on one of the stills using Yandex. This took us to various media reports from August 2021.

One such report was from Boston Globe dated August 17, 2021. The reports said a Russian military aircraft named Il-122V had crashed near the Russian capital of Moscow. The crew comprised two test pilots and an engineer, who lost their lives. The article is credited to Associated Press.

The same video was also tweeted by Alex Macheras, a British aviation analyst and broadcaster, on the day of the accident.

https://twitter.com/AlexInAir/status/1427565795073220611?t=N2ZM7T7ovZZYqTvA5coRug&s=19

A Russian news outlet, NTV, also reported about this incident while carrying the viral clip. The accident took place near the Kubinka airfield during a test flight of a newly made transport aircraft. They also reported that the video had been taken by a eyewitnesses.

Hence, it can be concluded that the video that has gone viral showing an aeroplane crash is not related to the recent tragedy in Nepal. In fact, the viral video is of a Russian military aircraft that crashed during a test flight in August 2021. The video is therefore old and not of the Pokhara crash.