Dr. Landon's alleged discovery of a plane's wreckage stuck in an iceberg is a Hoax. - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
December 14, 2023
A photo of a huge plane submerged/stuck in an iceberg is being shared on social media, claiming it to be a recent discovery by a group led by Dr Landon. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Photo of a plane stuck in an iceberg, which was discovered by a team of expeditioners led by Dr. Landon.
Fact: There are no credible news reports about any such recent plane wreckage discovery. Blog posts containing a story about Dr. Landon and his team discovering a plane stuck in an iceberg contain several unrelated stock images of crashed planes, glaciers, people walking in snowy ice formations, etc., making it evident that the story is concocted and fake. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the claim, we made a reverse image search online, leading us to a few website articles (here, here, and here) that contained a detailed story about discovering a plane stuck in an iceberg. A team which was led by Dr Landon allegedly made this discovery during their expedition in the Arctic.
These articles contained the same viral image but did not specify the location of the discovery. A keyword search on the internet about such a discovery led us to no credible information.
Generally, if a wreckage of such magnitude is discovered in an iceberg, most media outlets would report it. Last year, a mountain guide named Dominic Nellen discovered a plane wreck in the Swiss Alps, which was widely reported (here and here).
Also, the articles (here, here, and here) about the viral photo contained several images that, upon reverse image search, were found to be unrelated and were just stock images. This made us suspect that the whole story could have just been concocted.
The above image was shared in the article as the interior of the wrecked aircraft, which in reality shows the wreckage of a crashed airplane on a black sand beach in Iceland. The exterior (here and here) of that plane looks nothing close to what is seen in the viral photo.
The remaining photos used in the articles about the viral plane wreck photo are also unrelated to this black sand beach airplane wreckage. You can see some of them here, here, and here. This evidence makes it clear that the viral photo and the story associated with it is just a hoax.
To sum up, Dr. Landon’s alleged discovery of the wreckage of a plane stuck in an iceberg is a hoax.