Air India Flight 101

Air India Flight 101 was a scheduled Air India passenger flight from Bombay to London. On the morning of 24 January 1966 at 8:02 CET, the aircraft operating the flight accidentally flew into Mont Blanc in France. The accident was caused by a misunderstood verbal instruction from the radar controller to the pilot in lieu of VOR data, one of the receivers being out of service. All 117 members on board died on impact. Among the passengers who were killed was Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the founder & chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission.

The crash occurred just a few hundred feet away from where an Air India Lockheed 749 Constellation operating Air India Flight 245 on a charter flight, had crashed in 1950.

Accident

Air India Flight 101 was a scheduled flight from Bombay to London; and on the day of the accident was operated by a Boeing 707, registration ''VT-DMN'' and named ''Kangchenjunga''. The Pilot-In-Command was an 18-year veteran, Captain Joe T. D'Souza. After leaving Bombay, it had made two scheduled stops, at Delhi and Beirut, and was en route to another stop at Geneva. At flight level 190 (), the crew was instructed to descend for Geneva International Airport after the aircraft had passed Mont Blanc. The pilot, thinking that he had passed Mont Blanc, started to descend and flew into the Mont Blanc massif in France near the Rocher de la Tournette, at an elevation of . All 106 passengers and 11 crew were killed.

As the black box was never recovered, there is no way to verify that the pilot descended before Mont Blanc; some leaked files suggest that the aircraft was taken down by rapid decompression due an explosion in the cargo hold. The aircraft fuselage was spread across a wider area than the smaller area a controlled descent into terrain would suggest.

The theory of CIA involvement in the crash exists, based on alleged confessions of Robert Crowley, second in command of the CIA's Directorate of Operations (in charge of covert operations) at the time of the crash, presented in a book by pseudonymous author Gregory Douglas.

Casualties

Among the 117 passengers who were killed was Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the founder & chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission.

Aircraft

The Boeing 707-437 VT-DMN had first flown on 5 April 1961 and was delivered new to Air India on 25 May 1961. It had flown a total of 16,188 hours.
It was named Kangchenjunga, another high mountain.

Investigation

At the time, aircrew fixed the position of their aircraft as being above Mont Blanc by taking a cross-bearing from one VHF omnidirectional range (VOR) as they flew along a track from another VOR. However, the accident aircraft departed Beirut with one of its VOR receivers unserviceable.

The investigation concluded:

Recent discoveries

Much of the wreckage of the crashed Boeing still remains at the crash site. In 2008, a climber found some Indian newspapers dated 23 January 1966. An engine from Air India Flight 245, which had crashed at virtually the same spot sixteen years earlier in 1950, was also discovered.

In 1993, journalist Gregory Douglas conducted a series of interviews with CIA officer Robert Crowley, later published in 2013 in his book ''Conversations with the Crow'' after Crowley's death. Douglas claimed Crowley told him the CIA had assassinated Indian nuclear scientist Homi Bhabha on board the flight, thirteen days after assassinating Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, in order to thwart the Indian nuclear programme. This was allegedly done by setting up and exploding a bomb inside the cargo area of the plane.

On 21 August 2012, a jute bag of diplomatic mail, stamped "On Indian Government Service, Diplomatic Mail, Ministry of External Affairs", was recovered by a mountain rescue worker and turned over to local police in Chamonix. An official with the Indian Embassy in Paris took custody of the mailbag, which was found to be a "Type C" diplomatic pouch meant for newspapers, periodicals, and personal letters. Indian diplomatic pouches "Type A" (classified information) and "Type B" (official communications) are still in use today; "Type C" mailbags were made obsolete with the advent of the Internet. The mailbag was found to contain, among other items, still-white and legible copies of ''The Hindu'' and '' The Statesman'' from mid-January 1966, Air India calendars, and a personal letter to the Indian consul-general in New York, C.J.K. Menon. The bag was flown back to New Delhi on a regular Air India flight, in the charge of C.R. Barooah, the flight purser. His father, R.C. Barooah, was the flight engineer on Air India Flight 101.

In September 2013, a French alpinist found a metal box marked with the Air India logo at the site of the plane crash on Mont Blanc containing rubies, sapphires and emeralds, valued at over €245,000, which he handed in to the police to be returned to the rightful owners. As no rightful owners were found, however, in December 2021, the gems were divided up equally between the alpinist and the Chamonix commune: each receiving €75,000. As part of her research for her book ''Crash au Mont-Blanc'', which tells the story of the two Air India crashes on the mountain, Françoise Rey found a record of a box of emeralds sent to a man named Issacharov in London, described by Lloyd's.

In 2017, Daniel Roche, a Swiss climber who has searched the Bossons Glacier for wreckage from Air India Flights 245 and 101, found human remains and wreckage including a Boeing 707 aircraft engine. In July 2020, as a result of melting of the glacier, Indian newspapers from 1966 were found in good condition.

See also

*Air India Flight 245

References

Notes

Bibliography

*
*

External links

Final ReportArchive
– Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile
* Cockburn, Barbara.
Air India 707 crash wreckage on Mont Blanc
" ''Flight International''. 24 January 2009.

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Airliner accidents and incidents involving controlled flight into terrain
Aviation accidents and incidents in France
Aviation accidents and incidents in 1966
Accidents and incidents involving the Boeing 707
Mont Blanc
101
1966 in France
January 1966 events in Europe