What was claimed
A video suggests the Kabul airport footage of people running alongside a plane is faked as the people aren’t being blown over.
Our verdict
There is no evidence the footage is faked.
No evidence Kabul airport video is faked
26 August 2021
A video on Facebook suggests recent footage of people attempting to flee Kabul by clinging to the outside of a US Air Force plane while it taxied down the runway is fake, as the people in the video are not blown away by the aircraft’s jet engines.
For comparison, it contrasts the clip with footage from United Airlines showing a truck being hurled several metres when it drives behind a plane’s jet engines.
This is no evidence that the video from Kabul is faked.
Firstly, there is no evidence that the two planes were operating their jets with the same force in each clip.
Also, the clip from United Airlines clearly shows the truck proceeds without much disturbance until the point it is directly behind one of the jets. So it is conceivable that people can be near a moving aircraft without being much affected by the thrust from the jet engines, depending on where they are standing and what stage of take-off the plane is in.
American fact checkers at USA Today have looked at similar claims and found them to be false. The US Air Force confirmed to them the footage is real and of “a C-17 Globemaster III from the 62nd Airlift Wing at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington”.
We’ve also fact checked other claims which incorrectly allege the aircraft was not real, as well as other footage of the aircraft in flight.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the fact that at one point a truck was blown away by a jet engine is not evidence that a video of people near a plane in Kabul must have been faked.