Air India Flight 101

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]

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

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]

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.

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]

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]

• Final Report (Archive) – Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile (in French)
• Cockburn, Barbara. "Air India 707 crash wreckage on Mont Blanc." Flight International. 24 January 2009.