A video of passengers in a commercial aircraft arguing with airline staff was earlier circulating on Facebook with a claim that Air India flouted social distancing norms and overcharged passengers. After the video was fact-checked, a similar fake claim that the video is of a flight from Chicago to Delhi has started doing rounds on Whatsapp. The claim is false and the same video is being used again and again with a misleading claim.

A video claiming that an overseas flight flouted social distancing norms is being widely shared on WhatsApp. The same video was earlier shared with a claim that the flight packed with passengers is of Air India. Soon after it was fact-checked by Alt News to highlight that it was not Air India, it found its way to Whatsapp with another claim that the flight is from Chicago to Delhi without mentioning the name of the air carrier. The video shows a passenger in the aircraft arguing with one of the flight attendants. The passenger can be heard saying that the airline is charging three times the usual rate and despite that, is not following the social distancing rules. Further, the passenger threatens the flight staff by saying that he will sue the airline if he gets COVID-19.

The video was shared on Whatsapp with a message claiming “Flight from Chicago to Delhi. Get ready for more cases of corona”.

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The claim is false and misleading. To cross-check and ascertain the origin of the video, we broke down the video into keyframes and performed a Google reverse image search. This time, the results took us to an ANI news article.

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According to the article, the video is of PIA [Pakistan International Airlines] Karachi-Toronto flight when special flights were operated to airlift the stranded passengers. An argument broke out between the passengers and flight attendants regarding social distancing rules and safety issues. Taking a cue from the ANI article we did a relevant keyword search and found an article in Samaa, a Pakistani News Agency – that confirmed the fact that it is an incident aboard a Pakistani Karachi-Toronto flight. The video was shared again with another false claim that the flight was from Chicago-Delhi.

Furthermore, on May 8th, Press Information Bureau tweeted and clarified that the video is fake.