Sunday 1 December 2019

Oh, how easy it is to get things wrong


Many people living in London and south-east London were woken up in the early hours of the morning today by an "explosion". It turned out to be a sonic boom caused by two RAF Typhoons flying supersonic to intercept a plane that had lost communications with Air Traffic Control.

Several news services carried the story including the Guardian, which included this image in the first version of the article:


It wasn't long before numerous people on Twitter pointed out that the plane shown in the picture is not an RAF Typhoon but a Russian aircraft. The caption on the photo gave credit to the Royal Air Force/AP. Surely the Royal Air Force cannot have got it wrong? I ran an image search for Typhoon fighter planes to compare with the Guardian image and it most definitely is not a Typhoon.

I then ran a reverse image search on the photo in Tineye and found that it had first appeared in news articles in June earlier this year (2019).




An article from Business Insider had the same image but with the caption: "A Royal Air Force Typhoon from No. 11 Squadron, based out of Ă„mari Air Base in Estonia as part of 121 Expeditionary Air Wing intercepts a Russian Su-27, June 25, 2019. Royal Air Force". 



Another image search, this time on SU-2, seemed to confirm its identity and by now there were several tweets on Twitter from those who know about such things pointing out The Guardian's error.
I suspect that someone at the Guardian had run a search on the photos that they were allowed to use and that search picked up the word Typhoon in the description of the image. In their haste to publish the article they didn't double check what was actually depicted in the photo. An easy mistake to make if you are in a hurry and don't know that much about fighter planes.

The error has now been corrected:



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