AI crash victims remains found

Body parts that could belong to passengers killed in one or other of two Air India plane crashes more than 50 years ago have been found on Mont Blanc in the French Alps, sources said.

Daniel Roche, who is fascinated by air plane accidents, has spent years combing the Bossons Glacier made the discovery on Thursday.

“I had never found any significant human remains before,” he said. This time, however, he had found a hand and the upper part of a leg.

In January 1966, an Air India Boeing 707 from Bombay to New York crashed near Mont Blanc’s summit, killing all 117 people on board. Among the included Homi J. Bhabha, the father of India’s nuclear programme.

Another Air India flight crashed on the mountain in 1950, killing 48 people.

Roche said the remains he had found could be of a female passenger from the 1966 Boeing 707 flight, as he also discovered one of the plane’s four jet engines.

Roche contacted local emergency services in the Chamonix valley who took the remains down the mountain by helicopter and they were due to be examined by experts. “These remains are probably not from the same person,” said Stephane Bozon of the local gendarmerie. “They are probably from passengers, but between the two aircraft, it’s difficult to say”.

Recently, two bodies were also found, preserved in a receding glacier in the Alps. A DNA search identified the couple as Marcelin Dumoulin, a 40-year-old shoemaker at the time, and his wife Francine, who had disappeared in the Alps 75 years before.

In January 1966, an Air India Boeing 707 from Bombay to New York crashed near Mont Blanc’s summit, killing all 117 people on board. Among the included Homi J. Bhabha, the father of India’s nuclear programme.