Which Air India Constellation crashed into Mont Blanc?

On November 3, 1950, Air India Flight 245 was operating the Bombay–Cairo–Geneva–London route with a Lockheed L-749 Constellation registered VT-CQP. On the leg toward Geneva, the aircraft struck the Mont Blanc massif. There were no survivors: all 40 passengers and 8 crew members died, 48 people in total.

The L-749 was one of the most widely used versions of the original Constellation, predating the stretched fuselage of the Super Constellation. Its pressurized cabin and range made it attractive to airlines that, like Air India, were beginning to establish long-haul routes between Asia and Europe after World War II. Those flights were made in stages, with intermediate stops such as Cairo or Geneva, and crossed mountainous areas where navigation depended heavily on the crew's skill and on still-limited ground aids.

Mont Blanc, the great massif of the Alps, lay across the final leg of a route linking India to London in stages. The crash of the VT-CQP appears in the list of accidents involving the Constellation family, in which the same L-749 model appears in other tragedies of the era, such as the crash of Aeronaves de México Flight 111 into the La Latilla hill in 1958.

The case of the VT-CQP is also an example of how the history of these accidents is reconstructed today: the Constellation accident record lists for each one the date, model, registration, operator, route, and number of victims, allowing comparison of tragedies widely separated in time and place. In it, the L-749 appears again and again, a reflection of how widespread it was among international airlines in the immediate post-war period.