Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become more essential today than ever before.
Claim
Passengers of a Shree Airlines plane run off after the Saurya Airlines crashed at Kathmandu Airport.
Fact
Viral video shows an old clip of passengers fleeing after an emergency landing in Nepalgunj airport.
Many old and unverified videos of aviation tragedy are being shared online after a Saurya Airlines-owned aircraft bound for Pokhara crashed a few seconds after take-off from Kathmandu Airport on July 24. In this context, a seventeen-second video purportedly showing terrified passengers fleeing from a Shree Airlines plane after the crash of Saurya Airlines in Kathmandu is going viral on TikTok.
TikTok user @setokhaber123 posted a video showing passengers jumping off and fleeing from a Shree Airlines plane. A panic-stricken passenger tells the cameraperson to show the situation and says, “Oh see this Shree Airlines plane. We survived because of our good fortune.” Tex superimposed on the video reads, “Passengers of another plane ran helter-skelter after a plane crashed. It seems like KP Oli [Prime Minister and Chairman of CPN-UML] is going to kill all the people, not just the country. He should resign soon as his premiership is inauspicious for the country.”
The video posted on July 24 has garnered 18.8k likes, 1702 users have shared and 346 people have commented until the last country. The archive version of the TikTok video can be seen here.
Newschecker found the claim to be misleading.
Fact /Verification
To check the authenticity of the claim made in the viral video, Newschecker took several keyframes from the viral video and ran reverse searches on them. The search led us to a post on X (formerly Twitter) on the official handle of Routine of Nepal Band carrying a photo of Shree Airlines resembling the viral video including the aircraft’s call sign (9N-ANF). According to the post, dated August 4, 2022, a Kathmandu-bound Shree Airlines plane made an emergency landing in Nepalgunj after the aircraft emitted smoke.
We, then, conducted a search on YouTube by using relevant keywords from the viral video. A search led us to a video, dated August 5, 2022, published on a YouTube account named ‘Amazing shorts’. On checking the video, we found that the footage from 0.58-minute onwards exactly matched the viral video. The video with its subtitles indicated that footage showed the scary moment after a Shree Airlines (9N-ANF) plane bound for Kathmandu from Nepalgunj made an emergency landing a few minutes after the detection of fumes in the aircraft.
We found several articles about the emergency landing of Shree Airlines in Nepalgunj Airport after smoke appeared inside the plane. (See here, here)
Further, we also found another video, dated August 5, 2022, published on the YouTube channel named ‘Muktinath Khabar’ whose frame somehow resembled the viral video. We also noticed the person speaking on the viral clip in the video posted by Muktinath channel.
Thus, our findings clearly indicated that the viral video was captured in Nepalgunj airport in August 2022.
Conclusion
No, the viral video doesn’t show panic-stricken passengers rushing out of an aircraft after the crash of a Saurya Airlines plane at Kathmandu Airport. The viral video is actually from August 2022 captured in Nepalgunj airport after smoke was detected in the aircraft.
Result: False
Sources
Routine of Nepal Banda/X, August 5, 2024
Amazing Shorts, August 5, 2024
Muktitnath Khabar/YouTube, August 4, 2022
The Himalayan Times, August 4, 2022
Rising Nepal, August 4, 2022
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Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become more essential today than ever before.
