CLAIM: A photo of a plane underwater shows the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has finally been found.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The photo shows an old Lockheed Martin L1011 Tristar airplane in the Red Sea. The image comes from a video posted online by the Deep Blue Dive Center, a scuba diving company in Aqaba, Jordan. The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that vanished in 2014 remains missing.
THE FACTS: Social media users are sharing photos of an old, abandoned plane at the bottom of the sea, falsely claiming it shows the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which has been missing since it went down in 2014 with 239 people aboard.
A post on Twitter shows a photo of the front of a rusty airplane covered in algae and reads: The “Malaysia Airplane MH370 that disappeared 9 years ago has been found under the ocean with no human skeleton. The plane had 239 passengers on board.” The post had more than 61,000 likes as of Tuesday evening.
The image was also shared on Facebook, alongside several others of the side of the sunken plane and the seats inside, with the same claim it showed the Malaysian aircraft.
But the photo doesn’t show Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which remains missing. It shows an abandoned plane that was sunk off the coast of Jordan to create an artificial reef.
The image comes from an Instagram video posted on April 6 by the Deep Blue Dive Center, a company that offers scuba diving lessons and other underwater activities in the Gulf of Aqaba.
The original video also matches the other shots of the plane that were in the Facebook post.
“Tristar Airplane Wreck Red Sea, Aqaba JO,” reads the caption. The company noted on the post that the plane was scuttled, or deliberately sunk, in 2019, and has become an artificial reef. Deep Blue Dive Center did not immediately respond to the AP’s request for comment.
The plane is an old Lockheed Martin L1011 Tristar plane, according to Aqaba’s official tourism page. The plane was out of service and parked at nearby King Hussein International Airport for several years before the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority purchased the aircraft and sank it to become a destination for divers.
Brett Hoelzer, who works with Deep Blue Dive Center as a photographer and a dive master, confirmed to The Associated Press over Instagram that the image shared online was the Tristar. Hoelzer had taken similar photos of the same plane for his Instagram page.
The Malaysian Airlines flight vanished on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. An official search by Malaysia, Australia and China was suspended in 2016 and the countries agreed that an official search would only resume if there was credible evidence that identified a location, according to AP reporting.
A U.S. technology firm called Ocean Infinity also conducted a search that ended in May 2018 without any answerson where the plane is.
Malaysia’s Ministry of Transport did not immediately respond to the AP’s request for comment Tuesday, but there has been no recent news of any breakthroughs in the case.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
