Claim: A video shows two children who were recovered alive from the wreckage of Yeti Airlines Flight 691, which crashed on 15 January 2023 in Nepal’s Pokhara town.
Fact: The clip is neither recent nor linked to the 2023 Yeti Airlines crash in Nepal.
On 16 January 2023, Facebook user ‘ÃShøk Ä Mågâr’ posted videos and pictures allegedly about the Yeti Airlines Flight 691, which had crashed a day prior near Nepal’s Pokhara town.
One of the clips purportedly shows two minors who were recovered alive from the Yeti Airlines Flight 691’s wreckage. It appears as if both the children were badly burnt, with one of them lying in the background and the other in a wheelchair, but looking around, indicating that she is alive.
‘ÃShøk Ä Mågâr’ captioned the post as follows:
“Pokhara plane crash pahilako airport bata bideshi le khiche ko video [The video of the Pokhara plane crash was shot by a foreigner at the airport].”
Yeti Airlines Flight 691 crashed on 15 January 2023 in Nepal’s Pokhara town and left 71 of the 72 passengers dead, with one reported missing and the tragedy being termed the worst aeroplane disaster in 30 years in the country’s history.
Reuters quoted Prakash Pokhrel, an official coordinating rescue operation for Yeti Airlines Flight 691 at a Kathmandu airport, as saying the second-last body had been found.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check ran keyframes from the video through reverse image search tools and found what appears to be the original video, which, unfortunately, has been taken down.
We also came across a similar clip on TikTok — with more than 151,600 views — showing the wheelchair-bound child but from a different angle. The individual who filmed it appears to be using their front camera — selfie-style — as they stand next to the minor.
We discovered that the video was posted two months before the plane crash. We used page source on Google Chrome to ascertain that the video was posted at ‘1667719733’ in Epoch Unix time in computing terms, which, when converted to Pakistan Standard Time — GMT+0500 — turns out to be 12:28 PM on 6 November 2022.
The images on the left are from the viral video on Facebook, whereas those on the right are from the 2022 TikTok post
We have also created a visual to conveniently compare the child seen in the viral clip and the TikTok videos.
Another point worth noting is that the hair of the child in the wheelchair is intact, whereas people who suffer third-degree burns or above neither have their hair unscathed nor their skin bloody red and peeling off. The skin of someone suffering third-degree burns might appear white or blackened and charred, according to the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) and Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Lastly, no survivors have been reported in the 2023 Nepal plane crash.
Additionally, Soch Fact Check reached out to fact-checkers in Nepal and the Philippines. Deepak Adhikari of Nepal Check told us their “initial finding is that it may be from The Philippines” and that the clip “could be a Halloween video”.
Merinette Retona of VERA Files — a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) — told Soch Fact Check that the track playing in the background is a June 2022 song, “Left and Right”, by Charlie Puth and Jungkook of the South Korean K-pop band, BTS. It is part of the natural sound on track (NATSOT) and not an audio overlay.
The song was released in June 2022 and the viral video was uploaded on 6 November of the same year. Therefore, it is possible that the video actually depicts some sort of Halloween event that took place in late October or early November 2022.
Retona pointed out that the pattern of the pavement seen in the two videos is the same. She also suggested that the video was most likely made in the Philippines as there are jeepneys in the background. Jeepneys are a popular mode of public transportation that resemble minibuses in the country.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found that the video was shared widely on TikTok in connection with the 2023 Nepal plane crash. The posts appeared here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Conclusion: The clip is not connected to the 2023 Yeti Airlines crash in Nepal. It was available on the Internet in 2022 and the crash occurred in January 2023. The video was likely filmed in the Philippines around Halloween 2022.