Old video shared as visuals from cabin of Singapore Airlines flight hit by turbulence

A passenger was killed and 71 others injured due to severe turbulence on a flight from London to Singapore. 

Flight SQ321, a Boeing 777-300 ER with 211 passengers and 18 crew members, took off from Heathrow on Monday, May 20, 2024 and encountered severe turbulence en route. It was diverted to Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, landing at 3:45 pm local time on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, social media platforms have been flooded with news and updates on the incident. One such viral video shows the cabin of an aircraft hit by turbulence with people and objects being thrown about, published with captions stating that this is from the incident from earlier this week. Most of the posts we came across have published this video along with other visuals.

Here are some of the posts:

Archived Link

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Fact Crescendo found that this particular video of turbulence inside the cabin is old. Here are the details:

Fact Check

We began our investigation by splitting the video into keyframes and running an image search with the screenshots. We also noticed that in one of the posts, the video had the logo of Sky News so we added the keyword to our search. 

Our search led us to this video published by Sky News on their official Twitter handle on June 19, 2019 with the caption 

“This is the moment a flight attendant was thrown to the ceiling of the plane after violent turbulence.

Ten people had minor injuries on the flight from Pristina to EuroAirport Basel.

For the latest videos, head here: https://news.sky.com/videos”

Archived Link

Following this, we searched for news of the incident from 2019 with relevant keywords and came across many such articles. One of them, published by ABC News on June 18, 2019, with the headline “Severe turbulence leaves 10 injured, throws flight attendant into ceiling,” also has the same video embedded in it. 

We came across more news reports on the same and you can read/watch them here and here. 

The other visuals in the posts are from the recent incident and we found them here, here and here.

Conclusion

Fact Crescendo found that the visuals are actually from the cabin of a flight that had encountered severe turbulence in 2019 and has no connection with the recent incident of turbulence where one passenger lost their life when a Singapore Airlines flight entered an air pocket. However, the other visuals in these posts are, indeed, from the recent incident. Therefore, we can conclude that the posts are being shared with Missing Context.