At the end of summer 1968, at Ajaccio airport, 89 passengers and six crew members boarded the Caravelle F-BOHB at 10 a.m. for a very short flight. Landing in Nice is scheduled less than an hour later.
But as the plane began its descent about thirty kilometers off the coast of Antibes, the captain called the air traffic controllers: “We have fire on board.” The emergency landing procedure has been initiated, according to the dialogue transcribed by the investigators. “Nothing to do… we will crash, if this continues”, worries the commander. The control tower renews its instructions, but the plane no longer responds… It crashed into the Mediterranean Sea near the coast.
The trail of the military “blunder”
What happened ? The investigators list around fifteen hypotheses, ranging from a badly extinguished cigarette (at the time, smoking was allowed on planes) to… a collision with a missile. The more the years pass, the more the families of the victims lean towards the trail of a military “blunder”.
“What we are sure of is that there are people who have gone out of their way to hide things.”
Guerric Poncet, journalist at “Point” who has been investigating the case since 2017in “Sensitive Matters”
The lack of transparency that surrounds certain documents – such as a logbook with a torn page, or an untraceable army report – only fuels suspicions. Denouncing a plot, the families conduct their own research. And they manage to get their hands on documents that revive the case. After half a century of fighting for the truth, in 2019, they obtained the opening of the secret Defense archives.
A former sailor breaks the silence
Director Alexandra Colineau’s team was the first to consult these declassified archives. For six months, she took over the investigation and found a witness who could prove crucial. He is a former sailor who has never been heard by the courts.
“When people say there was no missile fire that day, I say: it’s a lie. We fired a missile before the crash!”
Jean-François de Saint-Périer, former sailor aboard the frigate “Suffren”in “Sensitive Matters”
In “Sensitive Affairs”, more than fifty years after the facts, he comes out of silence. His memories are very accurate – and quite different from the army version. Could the Ajaccio-Nice Caravelle affair be the best-kept state secret for half a century?
Extract from “Caravelle Ajaccio-Nice: a secret Defense crash?”, a document to see on April 18, 2022 in “Sensitive Affairs”, a magazine presented by Fabrice Drouelle and co-produced by France Télévisions, France Inter and INA according to the original France Inter broadcast.
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