The grim aftermath of the crash (Picture: AFP/Getty)
A tragedy in the Caribbean left 113 people dead after an Air France Boeing jet crashed on a mountainside.
The horror unfolded on the idyllic island of Guadeloupe 62 years ago after it went down on approach to the airport.
Air France’s Boeing 707-328 was travelling on its scheduled long-haul route from Paris via Lisbon, the Azores, Guadeloupe and Peru to Santiago, Chile.
It happened when the plane tried to descent into the island nation’s second town Pointe-à-Pitre.
Where the plane crashed (Picture: Metro.co.uk graphic)
Why exactly the plane crashed into the mountainside remains a mystery, although bad weather and lack of information about it is said to have contributed to the accident.
All 103 passengers and 10 crew on board died after it exploded on a forest hill on June 22, 1962.
The aircraft was just four months old.
How the Air France flight 117 crashed
To date, the tragic crash is the 11th worst involving a Boeing 707, but details of the cause are limited.
An Air France Boeing 707 similar to the crashed aircraft (Picture: Michel Gilliand/Wikimedia Commons)
At the time, the black boxes recording all flight data were just about to be installed in commercial planes.
In the US, a cockpit voice recorder became a requirement on planes on aircraft with four or more engines in 1967.
But conditions on the day were not ideal, and the airport is surrounded by mountains and requires a steep descent.
Weather that day saw violent thunderstorms and low-hanging clouds.
To make matters worse, the VOR navigational beacon was out of action.
Wreckage of the Boeing 707 which crashed near Deshaies in Guadeloupe pictured on June 26, 1962 (Picture: AFP/Getty)
The thunderstorms meant that the plane strayed 9.3 miles west from the track after it messed up the automatic direction finder readings.
The crash happened on hill called Dos D’Ane which translates as The Donkey’s Back at about 1,400ft.
Aftermath of the crash
The accident came less than three weeks after another Air France’s Boeing 707 crashed on June 3, 1962.
The funeral of 113 people in Guadeloupe (Picture: Express/Hulton Archive/Getty)
A probe into the circumstances could not point the exact reason, but it said insufficient weather information to the crew, failure of the ground equipment and the atmospheric impact on the ADF indicator created a deadly cocktail.
Air France’s pilots criticised under-developed airports like Guadeloupe’s for being ill-equipped to handle jets.
Rescuers carry the body of a victim after the crash (Picture: AFP/Getty)
Tex Johnston, chief test pilot at Boeing Aircraft, claimed in his 2014 autobiography that Air France’s crews were ‘habitually late’ for crew training organised by the manufacturer and ‘on occasion the airplane not serviced.’
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