Old Photo of Flooded Chennai Airport Shared As Ahmedabad

An old photo of aircraft partially submerged in water near the airport hangar in Chennai has resurfaced and is circulating on Facebook with false claims that it shows latest visuals of a flooded Ahmedabad Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Airport.

BOOM had debunked the same image in 2017 when it was viral with a similar claim. We found that the image is from Chennai’s International Airport from 2015 after floods hit the city of Tamil Nadu.

The image is now circulating with the caption, “#गुजरात_माडल का अहमदाबाद एयरपोर्ट बना बंदरगाह। #मीडिया की नजरों से ओझल क्यों? (The Gujarat Model-based Ahmedabad Airport has now become a port. Why is the media blind to it?)”

The link of the post can be seen here.

The archive of the post can be seen here.

Ahmedabad was hit by torrential rains in July end that flooded the airport and caused massive waterlogging. Commuters had to wade through waterlogged roads amidst the heavy downpour. Read here.

Fact Check

The same image was fact checked by BOOM in July, 2017, when it went viral with claims that it is from the Ahmedabad airport. According to BOOM's 2017 fact check, the error originated from news agency Press Trust of India; several media outlets also used the 2015 image of the Chennai airport and misreported it as Ahmedabad airport.

Furthermore, Union Minister Smriti Irani called out PTI in a tweet for using the incorrect image and captioning it as Ahmedabad's airport. The news agency later acknowledged the error and said it had terminated the services of the photographer who had miscaptioned it. The agency responded after getting pulled up by Smriti Irani, the erstwhile Information & Broadcasting Minister. In a tweet dated July 28, 2017, Irani wrote, "Attention: photographs of Chennai floods have been used and passed off as Ahmedabad @PTI_News Kindly alert all news establishments.”

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