An old video of a Dassault Rafale aircraft's stunt performance in Austria has resurfaced on social media with claims that it is an aerobatic demonstration by one of the five Rafale jets that India has procured from France.
The first batch of Rafale fighter jets were inducted into the Indian Air Force (IAF) at the Ambala Air Force station on July 29. The five fighter jets were escorted by 02 SU30 MKIs as they entered the Indian air space. According to reports, 36 Rafale jets will be delivered to India by 2022.
Several netizens have shared the 9 minute long clip believing that the visuals show an aerobatic demonstration by one of the fighter jets from the current batch that touched down the Ambala station. The video has been edited and overlaid with an audio of a song from a Hindi film, Hindustan Ki Kasam.
BOOM found that the video is from AirPower 16, an Austrian airshow.
The footage has been captioned on Facebook as, "5 Rafale fighter jets have reached India, see their charisma. Jai Hind." It has been shared more than 37,000 times at the time of writing this article.
(Original text in Hindi: ''#भारत में 5 #राफेल लडाकू #विमानों का हुआ आगमन, देखें #राफेल का #जलवा 🇮🇳🇮🇳 #जय #हिंद")
The post is archived here.
Another Facebook post also claims that these are visuals of airshow of the jets that landed in Ambala.
The post is archived here.
Fact Check
BOOM ran a keyword search on Dassault Rafale and found an extended video with the same visuals, which was uploaded on YouTube on September 30, 2016 by PaddyPatrone, an aviation vlogging channel from the platform. According to the description of the video, the uploader had filmed the footage in 2016, in Zeltweg, Austria.
The description reads, "Dassault Rafale | MOST BRUTAL JET DISPLAY EVER - I filmed this at the 2016 Airpower in Zeltweg, Austria. I can tell you, this was the hardest filming I did so far. Man that aircraft screamed like hell."
We reached out to Germany-based Patrick Nern who confirmed that the original video of the airshow was filmed by him at 2016's Airpower 16, in Zeltweg, Austria.
BOOM also found another video of the same event which was uploaded on September 5, 2016 on YouTube by Zseraldin Komlosi with the caption, "AirPower 16 ZELTWEG - Dassault RAFALE"
Österreichischer Rundfunk, an Austrian national public service broadcaster stated that the airshow was scheduled to be organised on September 2 and 3 that year. It reported "Airpower16 will take place in Zeltweg on September 2nd and 3rd under the motto 'We're flying to Austria.' With 240 aircraft from 20 nations, Airpower16 is not only the second largest event in Austria, but also one of the largest air shows in Europe."