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Claim: EgyptAir flight 804 was found after it went missing 50 years ago.
Fact: EgyptAir flight 804 crashed in 2016 and debris confirming the crash was found during an extensive investigation shortly following the incident.
On 13 June 2024, the Facebook user “Arman’s Diary” posted a split image of passengers asleep on a flight and skeletons on a plane. It also included a third picture of a flight crashing into the water. The post was captioned, “Breaking News: Egyptair Flight 804 Found After 50 Years, Mystery Finally Solved.” The same claim was posted by other Facebook users such as, “Fascinating History Page”, with two separate images of flights that had landed on water.
EgyptAir Flight 804
On Wednesday night, 18 May 2016, Flight 804 was reported to have left Charles de Gaulle Airport at 21:09 GMT (11:09 pm) from Paris, France. The flight was supposed to land at Cairo, Egypt at 01:15 GMT. While the flight was in Greek airspace, controllers repeatedly tried to contact the plane at 00:27 GMT, before it left Greek airspace. But the aircraft did not respond.
At 00:29 GMT, the plane left Greek airspace and at 00:29.40 GMT it vanished from Greek radar. The plane then disappeared from Egypt’s radar at 00:30 GMT (2:30 am Cairo time, 19 May 2016), when it was 280 km from the Egyptian coast. Search and rescue operations began at 00:45 GMT. Both French and Egyptian investigations were conducted.
EgyptAir later reported that two hours after Egyptian radar lost contact with the craft it received a distress signal from the plane’s emergency devices.
On Friday 20 May 2016 the European Space Agency reported that the Sentinel-1A satellite had detected an oil slick in the ocean about 2 km long, and around 40 km southeast of the flight’s last known location.
Egyptian naval officials supported by American, Greek, and French officials all took part in the search and rescue. On 21 May 2016, EgyptAir officials confirmed that flight debris had been recovered from where they believed the flight crashed in the Mediterranean. The debris included seats, body parts, and luggage.
French investigators then reported and confirmed, on 22 May 2016, that smoke was detected during the flight on Flight 804. At 00:26 GMT smoke was detected in the toilet, according to data sent back to the airline via the ACARS reporting system. ACARS or Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System is a digital data link system for transmitting short messages between aircraft and ground stations. At 00:27 GMT, more smoke was reportedly detected in the avionics area which contains the aircraft’s electronics and computers below the cockpit. This was before the craft lost contact with Greek radars.
On 1 June 2016, it was reported that French search vessels had picked up on signals from a black box from EgyptAir flight 804. Black boxes are two electronic recording devices, these devices are known as the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder both record essential flight data. The FDR records all instructions sent to electronic systems on the flight and the CVR records all audio in the cockpit. These boxes are built to withstand extreme heat, the force of a high-speed impact, ocean pressure, and saltwater erosion. Together they are essential when investigating and understanding flight accidents, and are therefore mandated to be on every flight.
On 15 June 2016, the Egyptian government announced that the John Lethbridge, a deep sea search vessel it had contracted, had discovered the wreckage and that they received photographic evidence of the wreckage. A day later it was confirmed that the vessel could locate and retrieve the black boxes from the wreckage. Egyptian authorities reported that the cockpit voice recorder had recorded that fire was mentioned and that the front section of the plane wreckage, “showed signs of high-temperature damage and soot.”
In 2018 the French Civil Aviation Accident Bureau, also known as BEA, stated in a rare press release that, “the most likely hypothesis is that a fire broke out in the cockpit while the aeroplane was flying at its cruise altitude and that the fire spread rapidly resulting in the loss of control of the aeroplane”.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check first looked into the claim in the captions, namely that EgyptAir flight 804 was found after 50 years. A quick Google search revealed that Flight 804 crashed on 19 May 2016 roughly 8 years ago, not 50 years. The crash led to a rapid and comprehensive investigation which concluded that a fire broke out in the cockpit of the plane and caused the accident.
The claim was shared with five different images. Three photos were shared in the first post, while the second post by “Fascinating History Page” included two other images.
The first image was of passengers asleep on a flight, a Google image search led us to a Pinterest post of the same image, credited to the photographer Troy Litten. When we searched through Litten’s Instagram account @troylitten, where he posts much of his photography, Soch Fact Check found the photo. The image post was captioned, “NIGHT FLIGHT / Can’t sleep on airplanes…” and was posted to his account on 10 November 2013, three years before Flight 804 went missing.
The second image in the claim showed skeletons seated on a flight which appeared to be AI-generated. While a reverse image search didn’t lead us to any sources or AI image creators, Soch Fact Check still suspected it was created using AI as the image contains several identifying characteristics.
AI imagery typically has blurred or distorted backgrounds and past the third row, the background is distorted. The skeleton on the aisle seat in the second row also shows the skull floating and not connected to the spine. Additionally, Soch Fact Check ran the image through an AI art detector run by Hugging Face, a French-American company that develops computation tools for machine learning and AI. The detector’s result stated it was 98% likely to be AI-generated.
The third and final image in the first post was of a flight crashing into water. Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search and found that it was a CGI rendering of the Malaysian Airlines MH370 crash from a National Geographic documentary, as reported by multiple outlets including The New Zealand Herald and The Daily Mail.
The first image of the second post and the fourth image overall show an aerial photograph of a plane that has landed in the water with people standing on the wings. The image clearly shows “Japan Airlines” written across the body of the aircraft. A quick Google search led to an archived report by the Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Archives of Japan Airlines Flight 350 crashing on 9 February 1982 in Tokyo Bay. The archived report included an image of the crash which is identical to the image in the viral claim.
Additionally, Flight 350’s crash was characterized by the cockpit section separating from the main body or fuselage of the aircraft during the crash. In the viral image, the cockpit section has visibly broken off as well.
The fifth and final image and the second image in the post by Fascinating History Page also shows a flight that has crash-landed into the water. The aircraft in this image has “US Airways” written across the body of the aircraft. This photo was of US Airways Flight 1549’s emergency water landing in 2009, also known as the Hudson Miracle. The image famously shows passengers waiting for rescue on the wings of the flight after the plane collided with a flock of geese and lost both engines prompting the emergency landing. The image can be seen here in a CNN report memorializing (archive) the incident.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found the same claim had been shared on Facebook here, here, and here, adding up to almost 1.5 million views.
Conclusion: The claim that EgyptAir flight 804 was found after 50 years is false. The crash happened in May 2016, eight years ago, and the wreckage was found in the Mediterranean Ocean in June 2016 by John Lethbridge, a deep sea search vessel, contracted by the Egyptian government to aid in the search.
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