This is fake, right?

Yup, I heard of it but did not see the video before. It was in the news. Totally amazing.

Snopes is leaning towards fake:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/airplane/onewing.asp

I'm leaning towards fake, though I have to say that is my intuition not something I can prove at the moment. The "cinema verite" shaky cam and hunt and seek focus seem over done, yet at the very end the tracking of the plane is perfect, excepting the shakes, so perfect the camera stops panning in anticipation of the plane turning and parking facing the other way, rather too perfect, me thinks. And the physics and shading of the landing sequence look CG to me.

Almost certainly fake. Score makes valid points. Also not that towards the end where the plane becomes stabilized by turning sideways it should start falling more rapidly since it no longer is an effective lifting body. In general, the level of stability of an object that asymmetric is not very high.

At around 20 secs in the video, just after the wing is "lost", there appears quite strange pixelation in and around the area where the wing should be. And the landing is of course just impossible. Definitely a fake.

Look at the end of the video. The fake toy plane makes a (too quick) left turn, hiding where the broken off wing would be, and gets fuzzy for a moment. And when it turns around it is a real airplane with a gut in it. Well done, though.

More viral marketing. Just like the popcorn popping cellphone videos..

I dunno.

Whether this one's fake or not, I think this kind of thing is entirely possible.

Some high-performance aerobatic planes don't need wings for lift; the thrust from the engine is greater than the weight, so they can fly straight up using only the propeller for lift.

Others have a thrust-to-weight ratio of less than one, but can still fly sideways (rolled 90 degrees), when the wings are useless for lift.

The approach shown is a standard maneuver with the plane flying sideways, but nose up, using brute thrust plus a significant amount of lift from the body of the plane acting like a extremely low aspect ratio wing. (Very short tip to tip, but long front to back, giving a modest lifting surface.)

If I lost a wing at low altitude in a plane like that, with a thrust/weight ratio of close to 1, that's exactly what I would try to do. (But if I had enough thrust, I'd fly straight up to a reasonable altitude and jump the hell out.)

Funny, when the wing came off and the voice near the camera so clearly said, "Where's his right wing?" I thought it was going to be intended as a humorous metaphor for the election results. I figured he'd crash and then it would say something like, "You can't fly with only a left wing."

It turned out he could, but by the end it no longer seemed it was any play on right/left terminology.

By the way, my vote's for fake.

...another thing that seems fake is the out of focus effect--it looks very flat, the whole screen goes out of focus all at once rather than the foreground or background first, as would be the case with a real lens. Additionally, you get circular artifacts (well, the shape of the lens iris) on the highlights when a real lens (or a better quality CG imitation effect) goes out of focus, and such artifacts are not visible in the video.

Fake at the end. Obvious rendering on the airplane's surfaces.

I'm not a physicist, but I'm thinking the physics of inertia, lift, etc., would blow that one right out of the sky. No way it's genuine. Fun, but fake.

Scote:

...another thing that seems fake is the out of focus effect--it looks very flat, the whole screen goes out of focus all at once rather than the foreground or background first, as would be the case with a real lens.

For things that are 50+ feet away, the difference in focus between that and infinity is very small. I would expect the whole image to go in and out of focus if the plane did.

A big difference in foreground and background focus would be a tipoff that the plane was actually small and close up, i.e., just a model. (You can make photos of real, large things look weirdly like photos of models by blurring the backgrounds, faking the "depth of field" effects you get for small stuff.)

I'm not sure about the lens flare issue.

What seems most surprising to me is that on landing, the landing gear doesn't give to the point that the prop hits the runway, causing Very Bad Things to happen. I'd expect the plane to tumble and get very crumpled, but the pilot might be okay.

"A big difference in foreground and background focus would be a tipoff that the plane was actually small and close up, i.e., just a model. (You can make photos of real, large things look weirdly like photos of models by blurring the backgrounds, faking the "depth of field" effects you get for small stuff.)"

I believe the landing sequence is computer generated, based on the odd looking physics, the shading, the "Gaussian blur" looking out of focus effect and the all to perfect pan at the end. An extreme telephoto does show a difference between foreground and background as they can have a very shallow depth of field, and the video in is supposed to be an extreme telephoto, as exemplified by the supposed hunt and seek behavior of the lens--which would only be necessary if their was a very shallow depth of field, otherwise there would be no need to manually adjust focus nor would an auto focus be hunting and seeking.

Now, as to the circular artifacts in a real lens blur, those are not "lens flare" but circles of confusion. The total lack of depth based differential in the defocus effect and the total lack of visible circles of confusion are pretty conclusive evidence that, at the very least, the out of focus effect is faked.

I'm still not believing that the wing would just fall off a plane like that. This is not true, correct?

fake. watch the landing again. the plane rotate around suddenly, drops the last distance to the ground and *sticks* there. fake. fake. fake.

At one point one senses that there is a hand holding the toy plane.

Yeah, at the end that looks really, really, really fake, like it was from a video game or something.

F-15 flying with one wing by an Israeli PilotA well-documented example.

Makes you wonder why they bother putting two wings on these babies.