Back to Africa Check

Photo of 1978 plane crash in US, not 2019 Ethiopian Airlines tragedy

A photo of a diving aircraft in flames has been shared on a popular Kenyan Facebook group page with the claim it shows the Ethiopian Airlines plane that went down on 10 March 2019, killing 157 people.

“Photo taken before Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 registration number ET 302 on a regular flight to Nairobi, Kenya crashed 6 minutes after take off,” the caption reads. “Plane had 149 passengers, 8 crew members on board”.

The plane was flying from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to Nairobi, Kenya when it crashed in Bishoftu, a town southeast of Addis.

But does the photo really show the ill-fated plane?



Pacific Southwest Airlines crash in San Diego


A reverse image search of the photo brings up the name “Pacific Southwest Airlines”. And letters on the side of the plane appear to spell “PSA”. 

A number of websites identify it as “Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182”.

The photo has been shared online for years, long before the Ethiopian Airlines crash and as early as 2012. But it’s much older than that. 

A different search leads to the photo library AP Images. The photo is featured on the library’s homepage

Searching “PSA Flight 182” on the website leads to a similar black-and-white photo. 

The caption reads: “Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 182, with its wing aflame after a collision with a smaller plane, plunges to earth killing all passengers and crew, in San Diego, Sept. 25, 1978. At least 150 people were killed when the planes crashed into a residential area.”

AP Images doesn’t name the photographer, but it has been published on many other websites where it is credited to Hans Wendt, a photographer for the County of San Diego.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Wendt was a finalist for a Pulitzer prize for one of his photos of the 1978 crash. 

The photo is more than 40 years old. It doesn’t show the 2019 plane crash in Ethiopia. – Dancan Bwire




 

Republish our content for free

We believe that everyone needs the facts.

You can republish the text of this article free of charge, both online and in print. However, we ask that you pay attention to these simple guidelines. In a nutshell:

1. Do not include images, as in most cases we do not own the copyright.

2. Please do not edit the article.

3. Make sure you credit "Africa Check" in the byline and don't forget to mention that the article was originally published on africacheck.org.

For publishers: what to do if your post is rated false

A fact-checker has rated your Facebook or Instagram post as “false”, “altered”, “partly false” or “missing context”. This could have serious consequences. What do you do?

Click on our guide for the steps you should follow.

Publishers guide

Africa Check teams up with Facebook

Africa Check is a partner in Meta's third-party fact-checking programme to help stop the spread of false information on social media.

The content we rate as “false” will be downgraded on Facebook and Instagram. This means fewer people will see it.

You can also help identify false information on Facebook. This guide explains how.

Add new comment

Restricted HTML

  • Allowed HTML tags: <a href hreflang> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote cite> <code> <ul type> <ol start type> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <h2 id> <h3 id> <h4 id> <h5 id> <h6 id>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
limit: 600 characters

Want to keep reading our fact-checks?

We will never charge you for verified, reliable information. Help us keep it that way by supporting our work.

Become a newsletter subscriber

Support independent fact-checking in Africa.
https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/meta-programme-fact-checks/photo-1978-plane-crash-us-not-2019-ethiopian-airlines
africacheck.org
CC-MAIN-2024-26
97818
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:G4CSMSQQ7WRS576FH27YC7XDZ45QN5UJ
<urn:uuid:dec1c075-dfc0-4263-a71d-a9a8be8afbc0>
2024-06-17T23:47:20Z
162.159.136.54
text/html
sha1:A76VGN5KLIH4ZKA2HWNRZPID3GA2PD4T
<urn:uuid:3b224e78-18dc-4a03-9773-9b4ee4f6f4ad>
https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/meta-programme-fact-checks/photo-1978-plane-crash-us-not-2019-ethiopian-airlines
response
<urn:uuid:600750c2-fe8e-4af5-8a9e-dac13b4c1e63>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-26
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-81
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/