Flight 447 pic: hoax revived

2009-06-12 14:04

A fake email dating from a 2006 plane crash has been revived for the Air France Flight 447 crash.

Verashni Pillay

Cape Town - A fake email dating from a 2006 plane crash has been revived for the Air France Flight 447 crash, with "two shots taken inside the plane before it crashed".

But the blurry shots of a passenger being sucked out of a gaping hole in an aircraft were ascertained to be screen shots from the pilot trailer for the popular series, Lost.

The hoax dates from an October 2006 posting by Brazilian blogger Carlos Cardoso, which he later revealed as an attempt to show that people are not sceptical enough of what they find on the internet.

In this case email users have proved Cardoso right, as many scanned the first few lines and hit forward - despite the email largely referring to an entirely different plane crash in the body of the email.

Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 was a scheduled passenger flight from Manaus, Brazil to Rio de Janeiro, which collided in mid-air with an Embraer Legacy business jet on September 29 2006 over the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

All 154 passengers and crew aboard the passenger flight were killed as the aircraft crashed into an area of dense rainforest, while the Embraer Legacy, despite sustaining serious damage to its left wing and tail, landed safely with its seven occupants uninjured.

East Coast Radio urged people to check emails on myth-busting site www.snopes.com before forwarding it to their entire address book.

Air France Flight 447 was a scheduled commercial flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France, that crashed on 1 June 2009 over the Atlantic Ocean. All 228 crew members and passengers onboard are believed to be dead and authorities are in the process of recovering bodies.