Rumour

A video of a jet refueling mid-air is going viral on social media with the claim that this is one of the Rafale jets which were refueling in the air. You can watch the video here:

Several social media users have shared the video with the same claim. A Twitter user shared the video with a caption "Few shots from 30,000 feet! Mid air refuelling of #RafaleJets on their way to #India #rafale."

On Facebook as well, many pages have shared the video with the same caption. You can see such posts here and here.

Our Investigation

We used the InVID tool to extract keyframes of the video and did a reverse image search of those frames and found that the same clip was tweeted by the Brazilian Air Force on September 28, 2018.

The tweet roughly translates to, “Interoperability! F-5 fighter of the Brazilian Air Force carries out refueling in flight on A-4 fighter of the Brazilian Navy!”

Fact

The video being shared on social media actually shows the F-5 fighter of the Brazilian Air Force carrying out refueling in flight on A-4 fighter of the Brazilian Navy. This has nothing to do with Rafale jets.

However, the Rafale jets were indeed refuelled mid-air from a French tanker. The Indian Air Force tweeted about the refueling on July 29, 2020.

Here is the picture of Rafale jet refueling mid-air.