A social media post with a photo of an aircraft submerged underwater is being shared with a claim that it belongs to the plane wreckage of the Malaysian Airlines plane MH370 which disappeared on 8 March 2014 with 239 people onboard. Let’s verify the claim made in this post.
Claim: The photo shows the plane wreckage of the missing Malaysian Airlines plane MH370.
Fact: The photo shows the Lockheed Martin L1011 Tristar aeroplane, which was sunk into the Gulf of Aqaba, Jordan, to promote dive tourism and Coral growth. Besides, the plane wreckage of MH370 has not been found yet. Hence the claim made in the post is False.
We performed a keyword search on the Internet to learn if the plane wreckage of the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 has been found. This search did not lead us to any credible news reports validating this information.
Over the years, several parts, possibly belonging to the MH370 plane, were found, but the whole wreckage still needs to be located to date. So, what exactly is the plane shown in the viral photo? To know this, we performed a reverse image search and were led to a Facebook post which contained images of an aircraft submerged underwater. The post’s description reads ‘Tristar plan(e) wreck. Red Sea, Aqaba, Jordan.’ A Pinterest post also contains a similar image of a plane wreckage.
According to these, the plane is a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar, located in Aqaba, Jordan—these photos of the aircraft match the one in the viral post. The Pinterest post led us to an Instagram post of the handle named deep blue dive center, which contains a video of the Tristar plane wreckage. The viral photo matches the keyframe of its initial portions; It is a cropped version of this keyframe.
According to a report by CNN about the Tristar aircraft plane wreck, ‘it was sunk into Jordan’s Gulf of Aqaba with the aim of encouraging dive tourism and coral growth…’ From all these evidences, it is pretty clear that the viral post wrongly claims the Tristar plane wreckage a that of MH370.
To sum up, this photo does not show the wreckage of MH370, a Malaysian Airlines plane that has been missing for nine years.
