Misstep for the 1pm news. An erroneous sequence was broadcast this Wednesday during a report on tourists stranded at Madeira airport during the 1pm news on France 2, as Internet users quickly noticed. The channel’s teams apologized for this “error” at the end of the news.
The broadcast was about the fires in Madeira that are disrupting air traffic. In the report, the journalist states that the strong winds sweeping the archipelago are forcing pilots to make extremely risky landings, “as shown in these archive images”. However, the sequence broadcast on television is not an archive image at all.
Internet users quickly noticed that the plane shown in the images… did not exist. In fact, it was an excerpt from the video game Flight Simulator, a very realistic flight simulator.
The presenter, NathanaĂ«l de Rincquesen, spoke at the end of the news: “We spoke to you a little earlier in this edition about the tourists stuck at Madeira airport (…) In the middle of the spectacular images of a plane landing, a virtual image slipped into our story. It was a mistake and we apologize.”