Video does not show Chinese fighter jet intercepting a U.S. Air Force aircraft

What's the claim?

Video footage of an aircraft flying close to another plane has been shared online, with the claim that a Chinese fighting aircraft intercepted a U.S. aircraft. The video appears to have been recorded from inside one of them. We can hear two people discussing that the other plane is getting closer, getting within "five meters of the wing" and being "twenty feet off our wing," calling it an "abnormal and unusual intercept."

An X (formerly Twitter) user shared this video with the caption, "A Chinese PLA Air Force fighter jet is repelling a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance aircraft. The two planes are only 3 meters apart." The post had 206,700 views and 2,400 likes. This video was also shared on Facebook, and archives of such posts can be found here, here, and here.

Screenshots of the viral video shared online. (Source: X/Facebook/Modified by Logically Facts)

However, the video shows a Chinese military plane intercepting a Canadian military aircraft over international waters off the coast of China in 2023. It is not a U.S. military plane.

Here are the facts

A reverse image search on one of the keyframes from the viral video led us to the original video posted on the YouTube channel of Canadian news outlet Global News (archived here), uploaded on October 16, 2023. It was titled "'Are we okay?': Chinese military jet intercepts Canadian Forces plane in 'aggressive manner.'" The now-viral footage starts at the timestamp of 0:09 seconds and ends at 1:09 seconds. The audio matches the viral video. According to the video description, the voices heard in the video are of Global News reporter Neetu Garcha and a man on board the Canadian aircraft.

Global News reports that its reporter Neetu Garcha was onboard the Canadian Armed Forces Aurora aircraft intercepted by a Chinese military jet on October 16, 2023. It adds two Chinese military jets intercepted the aircraft for hours in an "aggressive manner" over the international waters off the coast of China when a Canadian plane was on a U.N. mission called Operation Neon. Under this mission, Canada "periodically deploys military ships, aircraft, and personnel to conduct surveillance operations" to enforce United Nations Security Council sanctions imposed against North Korea.

In a report about the incident, the reporter on board, Garcha, wrote that "two different Chinese jets intercepted the Canadian plane consistently for multiple hours" during the mission that lasted over eight hours, and they came within "five meters of the plane." One of the jets was "aggressively flying back and forth in close proximity while appearing to put the Canadian plane in its blind spot," she wrote in her article.

Reuters also reported on this incident on October 16, 2023, that a Chinese jet was "five meters (16 feet)" away from a Canadian surveillance plane. Canadian Defence Minister Bill Blair condemned this interception and said, "It was quite frankly dangerous and reckless. And those types of behaviors are not ever acceptable, and we will express that to the People's Republic of China in the most appropriate way." 

Yahoo News Canada reported that Chinese military jets intercepting Canadian CP-140 Aurora aircraft occurred in the presence of Major-General Iain Huddleston over the East China Sea.

Logically Facts has contacted Global News reporter Neetu Garcha for a comment. We will update the story once we receive a response.

The verdict

A video of a Canadian surveillance aircraft being intercepted by a Chinese military plane over international waters of the East China Sea in 2023 is being misrepresented as the Chinese plane intercepting a U.S. military aircraft. Therefore, we have marked this claim as misleading.