After an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan in December, killing 38 people, a video surfaced across social media in multiple languages alongside the claim it showed the moments before the tragedy. The clip, which first circulated in news reports from September 2024 about an Air Algerie flight’s technical malfunction, was also falsely linked to South Korea’s deadliest aviation disaster on December 29 that killed 179 people. The plane seen in the video was able to return safely to the Algiers International Airport.
“The final sounds heard on board flight J2-8243. Shocking news before the new year due to an Azerbaijan Airlines crash in Kazakhstan,” read a December 28, 2024 Thai-language post on TikTok, where it racked up 1.5 million views.
The video shows passengers chanting an Islamic prayer in a plane with the oxygen masks deployed. A flight attendant in blue is seen walking down the aisle.
It then cuts to footage of the wreckage of a plane, a memorial and people saluting in a terminal.
Screenshot of the false TikTok post, taken January 2, 2025
The post surfaced after an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 plane crash-landed on Christmas Day in Kazakhstan, killing 38 of the 67 people onboard (archived link).
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has demanded that Moscow admit it mistakenly fired on the plane as it tried to make a scheduled landing at the Grozny airport in Russia.
Russia has not confirmed that one of its air-defense missiles hit the plane, though President Vladimir Putin told Aliyev in a phone call that the systems were active at the time and that he was sorry the incident took place in Russian airspace.
The same claim linking the video to the Azerbaijan Airlines crash also surfaced in other Facebook posts from Thailand, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
It also surfaced in simplified Chinese social media posts that falsely claimed it showed the final moments onboard a Jeju Air flight from Thailand that crashed in South Korea and killed all but two of the 181 people onboard (archived link).
The exact cause of the Boeing 737-800 crash is still unknown, but investigators have pointed to a bird strike, faulty landing gear and the runway barrier as possible issues.
The footage in fact circulated months before the two fatal aviation disasters, alongside reports of a technical malfunction that forced an Air Algerie flight to turn back to Algiers in September 2024.
Air Algerie flight
A reverse image search on Google traced the video to a Facebook post by Info Trafic Algerie, an Algerian traffic information site, on September 23, 2024 (archived links here and here).
The post, written in Arabic, said the video showed Air Algerie flight AH 3018, which experienced a technical malfunction on its way to the Turkish city of Istanbul.
“The flight captain decided to return to Houari Boumediene International Airport an hour after take-off as a precautionary measure to ensure the safety and security of the passengers and crew,” read part of the Arabic-language post.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (left) and the video shared by Info Trafic Algerie (right):
Screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (left) and the video shared by Info Trafic Algerie (right)
A screenshot of the video was also published alongside a report about the flight’s return to Algiers by local daily Al Shorouk News on September 24, 2024 (archived link).
Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera also published a similar video on its official YouTube channel on September 25, 2024, with chants of “Allahu Akbar (God is greatest)” heard from the 36-second mark (archived link).
The video’s description said it shows moments of panic experienced by passengers in an Algerian plane that experienced a technical malfunction, forcing it to make an emergency landing.
The rest of the footage included in the circulating video is genuine — the clip of the Azerbaijan Airlines wreck was published by multiple news outlets, including British newspaper the Telegraph (archived link).
It also included video of a memorial for victims of the crash, as well as footage of a minute’s silence for the victims at the Baku Airport — where the plane departed from — published by AFP here (archived links here and here).
