Air India Flight 101

Air India Flight 101 was a scheduled Air India passenger flight from Bombay to London that accidentally flew into Mont Blanc in France on the morning of 24 January 1966. 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. The crash was almost at the exact spot where Air India Flight 245, a Lockheed 749 Constellation on a charter flight, had crashed in 1950 with the loss of all 48 on board that aircraft.[1]

Air India Flight 101
An Air India Boeing 707 similar to the one involved
Accident
DateJanuary 24, 1966 (1966-01-24)
SummaryControlled flight into terrain
SiteMont Blanc massif, France
Aircraft
Aircraft typeBoeing 707–437
Aircraft nameKanchenjunga
OperatorAir India
RegistrationVT-DMN
Flight originSahar International Airport, Bombay, India
1st stopoverDelhi International Airport, New Delhi, India
2nd stopoverBeirut International Airport, Beirut, Lebanon
Last stopoverGeneva International Airport, Geneva, Switzerland
DestinationHeathrow Airport, London, United Kingdom
Passengers106
Crew11
Fatalities117
Survivors0

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 Kanchenjunga.[2] After leaving Bombay, it had made two scheduled stops, at Delhi and Beirut, and was en route to another stop at Geneva.[2] At Flight Level 190, the crew was instructed to descend for Geneva International Airport after the aircraft had passed Mont Blanc.[2] 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 4,750 metres (15,584 ft).[2][1] All 106 passengers and 11 crew were killed.[1][3]

Passengers

Among the 117 passengers who were killed was Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission.[1]

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.[4] It had flown a total of 16,188 hours.[4]

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.[2][1]

The investigation concluded:[2]

a) The pilot-in-command, who knew on leaving Beirut that one of the VORs was unserviceable, miscalculated his position in relation to Mont Blanc and reported his own estimate of this position to the controller; the radar controller noted the error, determined the position of the aircraft correctly and passed a communication to the aircraft which, he believed, would enable it to correct its position.

b) For want of a sufficiently precise phraseology, the correction was mis-understood by the pilot who, under the mistaken impression that he had passed the ridge leading to the summit and was still at a flight level which afforded sufficient safety clearance over the top of Mont Blanc, continued his descent.

CIA assassination theory

The journalist Gregory Douglas claims in his book Conversations with the Crow that the former CIA officer Robert T. Crowley told him in conversations held between 1992 and 1996 that the US Government had the CIA assassinate the Indian nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha by planting a bomb in the cargo hold of flight AI 101. The book claims that 13 days earlier, the CIA had also murdered the Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent, one day after he signed the Ceasefire Agreement with Pakistan, called the Tashkent Pact. Douglas quotes Crowley as having said, "We had trouble, you know, with India back in the 60's when they got uppity and started work on an atomic bomb. The thing is, they were getting into bed with the Russians." On Bhabha, he said, "[T]hat one was dangerous, believe me. He had an unfortunate accident. He was flying to Vienna to stir up more trouble when his Boeing 707 had a bomb go off in the cargo hold." In October 1965, Bhabha had announced on All India Radio that they could build an atomic bomb within 18 months if given the go-ahead by the Government of India.[5][6]

Recent discoveries

Wreckage of the crashed Boeing still remains at the crash site. In 2008, a climber found some Indian newspapers dated 23 January 1966.[7] An engine from Air India Flight 245, which had crashed at virtually the same spot in 1950, was also discovered.

On 21 August 2012, a 9 kilograms (20 lb) 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.[8][9] 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.[10] 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.G.K. Menon.[11] 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.[12]

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 worth more than $300,000, which he handed in to the police to be returned to the rightful owners.[7][13] 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.[7]

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.[5]

In July 2020, as a result of melting of the glacier, Indian newspapers from 1966 were found in good condition.[14]

gollark: <@!336962240848855040> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notifications_API and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API
gollark: Neat, how old is it?
gollark: Although my 1337 h4xx0r skills basically just extend to "I know how to use nmap a bit".
gollark: There is more people can do than just tie up your internet connection a lot.
gollark: Hmm, so I can cybernuke you?

See also

References

Notes
  3. Sean Mendis (26 July 2004). "Air India : The story of the aircraft". Airwhiners.net. Retrieved 13 June 2013.
  5. Neera Majumdar (24 January 2018). "Sabotage or accident? The theories about how India lost nuclear energy pioneer Homi Bhabha". ThePrint.in.
  6. Srinivas Laxman (30 July 2017). "Operative spoke of CIA hand in 1966 crash: Report". The Times of India.
  7. Patrick Bodenham (14 March 2014). "The mystery of Mont Blanc's hidden treasure". BBC News.
  8. "Diplomatic post bag from 1966 Indian plane crash found on Mont Blanc". Telegraph.co.uk. 30 August 2012. Retrieved 28 November 2013.
  9. "Agence-France-Presse". Google.com. Retrieved 22 February 2019.
  10. "Indian diplomatic bag found after 46 years". Firstpost.com. 18 September 2012. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  11. "'Diplomatic bag' reaches New Delhi". Deccanherald.com. 19 September 2012. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  12. "AI purser brings back diplomatic bag lost in crash that killed father". Indianexpress.com. Retrieved 27 February 2017.
  13. "Climber finds treasure trove off Mont Blanc". Yahoo News Malaysia. AFP. 26 September 2013. Archived from the original on 28 September 2013.
  14. "Indian papers resurfacing in French Alps could be from 1966 plane crash". BBC News. 13 July 2020.

Bibliography
  • Pither, Tony (1998). The Boeing 707 720 and C-135. England: Air-Britain (Historians) Ltd. ISBN 0-85130-236-X.
  • Rey, Françoise (2013) [1991]. Crash au Mont-Blanc, les fantômes du Malabar Princess et du Kangchenjunga (in French). Chamonix: Le Petit Montagnard. ISBN 9782954272092.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.