Air India Flight 101
1966 plane crash of an Air India Boeing 707 into Mont Blanc, France
Air India Flight 101 was a scheduled Air India passenger flight from Bombay (present-day Mumbai) to London, via Delhi, Beirut, and Geneva. On the morning of 24 January 1966 at 8:02 CET, on approach to Geneva, the Boeing 707 operating the flight accidentally crashed into Mont Blanc in France, killing all 117 people on board. Among the victims was Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the founder and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India.
The accident occurred just 200 m (660 ft) from where an Air India Lockheed 749 Constellation operating as Air India Flight 245 while 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 Kanchenjunga. 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 (19,000 feet; 5,800 m), 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 4,750 metres (15,584 ft). All 106 passengers and 11 crew were killed.
The public source identifies “Air India Flight 101” as 1966 plane crash of an Air India Boeing 707 into Mont Blanc, France. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around India, Flight and plane.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4016228. Authority coordinates are 45.878, 6.867. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1966 and 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “Air India Flight 101” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.