Photo of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

Claim:   Photograph shows debris scene of shot-down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

FALSE

Example:   [Collected via Facebook, July 2014]

Is this a real photo of the shot down Malaysia Airlines plane?

Origins:   On 17 July 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur

went down over eastern Ukraine, killing nearly 300 passengers and crew. U.S. officials have stated that the plane was shot down, based on intelligence capabilities monitoring the area. Shortly after the downing of that airliner, the image displayed above was circulated via Facebook and other social media sites with captions identifying it as a picture of the "crashed" Flight 17.

However, the image displayed above has nothing to do with that tragedy (a fact which should be obvious given that eastern Ukraine is nowhere near a tropical beach). It's a screen shot from the 2004 pilot episode of the ABC television series Lost (in which survivors of a plane crash are forced to work together in order to survive on a seemingly deserted tropical island) that someone has altered by replacing the logo and markings of the fictional Oceanic Airlines used in that TV series with those of Malaysia Airlines:

Last updated:   20 July 2014