However, there are some clues that can help you spot if an air crash video is computer-generated. We’ve debunked some of these as having been shared out of context during various conflicts, including in Afghanistan and Ukraine. “If it’s easy for them to tell the difference, we’re not doing a good enough job!” he told AFP Fact Check.īeyond flight simulators, some video games such as DCS World and Arma 3 also feature dramatic war scenes with fighter planes. “We of course want the viewers to find it hard to tell the difference between the simulation and the real world,” said Scott Phillips, sales and marketing manager at the London-based flight simulation company Just Flight, which develops add-ons to make flight simulators as realistic as possible. Airliners often bear the logos of real companies. And across simulators, the planes themselves are finely detailed. For example, Microsoft Flight Simulator X uses real satellite imagery from Microsoft’s Bing Maps to generate a virtual world. Realistic imageryįlight simulator programs can look very realistic. “FSX” is shorthand for Microsoft Flight Simulator X and “AFS2” stands for Aerofly FS 2 Flight Simulator. It shows the crash of a flight bearing the logo PIA, for Pakistan International Airlines.īut if you click to expand the video’s description, you’ll see there is a disclaimer at the end: “All crashes created with: FSX & AFS2 & X-Plane 11”. The images are in fact taken from the flight simulator X-Plane 11 – known to fans as XP11, which was noted in brackets at the end of the video’s title.Īnother example: a video on YouTube, titled “Plane Crash Karachi ++ PIA A320”, was viewed more than 1.8 million times since 2020.

Screengrab showing just a few of the 1,200 comments on the video shared on Facebook

X plane 11 video