I’m sitting in traffic on my own drive home, half-listening to the radio, when a video pops up on my phone at the next red light: a huge passenger jet skidding down a rain-soaked highway in flames, cars scattering out of its path. The caption says it made an emergency landing on a Georgia highway, and it’s got that grainy, chaotic dashcam feel that makes disasters look real.

Something about the flames looked wrong, though. Too even, too orange, like they were painted onto the metal instead of actually burning off it. And a plane that big landing on a highway, in flames, with no deaths reported anywhere, seemed like something I would have already heard about on the actual news.

So I looked into it. Here’s what I found.

A ‘Passenger Jet’ Crash-Lands on a Georgia Highway in Flames — No Passenger Jet Ever Did

AI-GENERATED — The clip shows a jet crash-landing in flames. No outlet anywhere reported it happening.

On August 5, a video began spreading on X showing what looked like a large passenger jet making a fiery emergency landing on a rain-slicked Georgia highway, captioned as if it had just happened. It has the shaky, close-to-the-ground look of dashcam footage, exactly the kind of clip that spreads fast because it looks like something a real driver caught by accident.

An AI-detection tool called Hive Moderation put the odds the video was AI-generated at 96.1%. Searches for the exact incident, using phrases like "emergency landing on highway" and "plane landing on highway in georgia," turned up nothing matching a large jet crash-landing in flames. What those searches did turn up were three different real small-plane emergency landings on Georgia and nearby highways over the past several months, including one in Florida on August 3 and one on a Georgia highway back in July, none of which looked anything like the viral clip.

That's very likely where the fake got its inspiration. Small planes really do occasionally make emergency landings on highways, and it happens often enough that real dashcam footage of it already exists online. The fake video borrows that same believable setup, a plane down on a road, cars swerving, and scales it up into something far more dramatic than anything that's actually happened.