Claim: Scientists have already discovered the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, a plane that disappeared on the radar screens and has not been located since 2014.
Rating: FALSE
Why we fact-checked this: The claim, which was posted on March 4, has already received 3,400 reactions, 1,200 comments, and 346 shares as of writing.
The post used a composite photo of two underwater aircrafts and one being pulled to the seashore to support its claim.
It says, “Confirmed. Scientists finally found the location of Malaysia Flight 370. What they discovered will leave you speechless!”
The facts: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has not yet been found as of writing.
In December 2024, the transport minister of Malaysia announced that they will continue the search for the missing plane after an agreement with Ocean Infinity, a marine robotics company that uses robots to monitor the ocean and seabed.
The Malaysian government has agreed in principle to accept Ocean Infinity’s offer to resume the search under a “no find, no fee” agreement, according a report in Bernama, the national news agency of Malaysia.
The disappearance of MH370 marked its 11th year on March 8, 2025, but authorities still have no trace of the plane’s exact location.
Misused, AI-generated photos: All photos used in the post are not images of the said airplane.
The first photo is the wreck of Convair 400 airplane, known as the Renaissance Airplane. It was published in DiveBuddy website in 2013, the year when the disappearance of MH370 had not yet happened.
The second photo shows a dummy corpse trapped in an underwater plane. A source of the photo in Tumblr wrote that a diver saves the mannequin as part of a training exercise. It did not mention MH370.
The third image of a plane on the seashore is Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated. Sightengine AI detector flagged the photo as 96% AI while Hive Moderation detected it as 96.5% AI.
About the MH370: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, also called as Boeing 777, disappeared on March 8, 2014 without a trace. Out of the 239 people on board, 227 were passengers including 153 Chinese.
The flight took off from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur headed for Beijing. Flight MH370 changed its trajectory and lost all communication with air traffic controllers an hour after takeoff.
Authorities were unable to pinpoint a concrete cause for the plane’s disappearance, but they have offered possible reasons including oxygen running out in the aircraft causing the passengers to become unconscious. It suggested that the aircraft then kept flying on autopilot until its fuel ran out and crashed into the ocean.
It was described as one of the biggest mysteries and most expensive searches in the history of civil aviation. Twenty-six countries contributed planes, ships, submarines and satellites in 2014 as part of the multinational effort to search for the missing plane. – Angelee Kaye Abelinde/Rappler.com
Angelee Kaye Abelinde, a campus journalist from Naga City, is a second-year Journalism student of Bicol University and the current copy editor of The Bicol Universitarian. She is a graduate of the Aries Rufo Journalism Fellow of Rappler for 2024.
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