Emergency drill at Nairobi airport generates false claims about plane crash

Twitter posts featuring photos of a plane on fire claimed that an aircraft crashed at Nairobi’s international airport. However, the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) clarified there was an emergency drill at the airport, not an accident. AFP Fact Check also found that one of the photos shared online shows a 2019 Russian plane crash.

“BREAKING NEWS JKIA plane crash,” reads a tweet published on May 31, 2023.

The post includes an image of a plane burning on an airport runway.

The Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA), which lies on the outskirts of Nairobi, is one of Africa’s busiest airports (archived here), handling 6.5 million passengers last year, according to government figures.

Similar claims also circulated in other tweets and on TikTok.

However, the claim that a plane crashed at JKIA is false.

Emergency drill

On May 31, 2021, the Kenya Airports Authority tweeted that an aircraft overflying Nairobi “encountered an incident at JKIA”.

Mainstream media then reported a “plane accident at JKIA”.

However, as reported by AFP, KAA released a statement less than an hour after the first tweet clarifying that they had conducted a “full-scale emergency drill” at JKIA.

The drill included a “simulated incident of an aircraft that crushed at the airport (sic)”, according to the statement.

“The primary objective of this exercise was to test and evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the airport’s emergency response procedures,” it said.

“This incident was entirely simulated and did not pose any real danger to passengers, crew members or airport operations.”

Russian crash

Several tweets included a photo of a burning plane on a runway.

Using a reverse image search, AFP Fact Check found the original image (archived here) was from a 2019 Russian plane crash that killed 41 people.

The crash was reported by media (archived here) around the world, including by AFP.

The plane caught fire at a Moscow airport. This tweet includes a video featuring an angle similar to the one seen in the original photograph.

“Landing of the flaming Sukhoi Superjet 100 at Sheremetyevo. Pilots are people of steel,” reads the tweet’s caption in English.

Sheremetyevo is an international airport (archived here) near Moscow.

Several planes in the photo and video have red, white, and blue Russian airline Aeroflot markings on their tail wing (archived here).