June 22, 1962. A four-month-old Boeing 707 takes off from Paris-Orily Airport, carrying 103 passengers and 10 crew members.

Among those on board, Justin Cateye, a World War II hero and founder of the Guillaume Socialist Party, also on the flight was Paul Neitcher, a black consciousness movement poet and native of Guadalupe returning home.

After two un eventful stopovers first in Lisbon, then in the Azores, this young aircraft disappeared over Guadalupe Island in the Caribbean, never making it to its final destination of Santiago Chilli.

What happened to this ill-fated flight? Was the crash caused by the notoriously complicated weather patterns in the Caribbean? Could it have been equipment issues in this new aircraft? How much did human air play a factor in the demise of Air France 117? Find out on this episode of Black Box Down.

Hey everyone, welcome to Black Box Down. It's Gus Encriss. Hi Chris. Hello. We're talking about a little older incident today, Air France 117, took place back in 1962. Kind of a different era, 707. I don't know if we've covered an incident with this plane either. We'll dig a little into that. But slightly different than some of our other incidents that we've talked about.

I'm curious if the people on the plane have anything to do with the disappearance because you don't normally specify the passengers.

Well, the reason that we highlighted these people Chris is that this was the test pilot episode for Black Box Down.

We recorded this about a year and a half ago, but then we never released this episode. We recorded it just as a test and we thought that it would be interesting to highlight some people of note on this flight. We weren't sure if that was something we wanted to do continuing going forward in the series.

So that's why like this was episode zero the first one we ever did and people seem to like it. So we made another test episode that we released for first members on the rich chief website. People like that. So then that's when we started going ahead and making full blown episodes for everyone else. And you're like, we need to go back redo this one again. Add some Chris. Yeah, we have to sprinkle a little Chris on it. I thought it was a good incident. And I'm happy that we're going to, you know, kind of touch it up a bit and talk about it now as a full blown episode on its own. So like I said, this flight flew from Paris, France, obviously, to Lisbon, Portugal.

And then to the San Maria Island in the Azores before reaching point a ptry in a Guadeloupe. So I apologize right off the bat. There's a lot of French names in this episode. I'm going to do my best here, but I'm probably going to get some wrong. So apologies if you're a French speaker.

This flight had three more destinations after a Guadeloupe, but it never made it. The flight was uneventful before reaching Guadeloupe. And while on approach to La Rizette airport, the instrument started to malfunction and the plane actually got off course.

And it ended up crashing into a forest on a hill named Do-Dan, which means the donkeys back. The plane exploded, killing everyone on board. The crash actually went unnoticed. It took three hours for a distress signal to be sent.

It went unnoticed as in like no one knew it went down or they didn't, they weren't aware that the plane didn't land or how did it actually get discovered?

Yeah, you're right. Nobody knew that the plane never made it. Nobody realized that the plane should have landed three hours ago and it never made it.

Oh, damn. Well, Dory, we're going to get into the specifics on why that happened a little later in the episode. Actually, the cause of the crash is a mystery, but we're going to go over some possibilities and speculate on probably what happened.

So we, I think we can make some pretty strong conclusions as to what happened. So we're going to break down a few different causes. We'll start here with the first potential cause, which is human error.

So we're going to give a little bit of background on someone first before we get to that. There was this guy named Alvin Tex-Johnston who was born in 1914.

He was an American test pilot who made his first flight in 1925. If you do the math, he was 11.

So wait, what?

To put that in perspective, the Wright brothers had just flown a fixed wing aircraft for the first time 22 years before that.

You know, so planes were really a brand new thing. People were really just starting to figure them out.

And he was an instructor in the civilian pilot training program until 1941 when he was transferred to the US Army Air Corps.

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