June 23, 2026.   Flight 182.

Forty-one years ago today, a bomb planted by a Canada-based Sikh militant group destroyed Air India flight 182, a Boeing 747 bound from Montreal to London (the first leg of an onward service to Delhi and Bombay). The 747 fell into the Atlantic about a hundred miles off the coast of southwest Ireland, killing all 329 passengers and crew.

The attack remains the deadliest terrorist bombing ever of a commercial jetliner.

The bombing was meant as retaliation for the Indian military’s 1983 siege of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, Sikhism’s holiest site, during which thousands were killed.

What a lot of people don’t know is that two Air India 747’s had been targeted that day. A second bomb, intended for a Tokyo-Bangkok-Delhi flight, detonated prematurely at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, killing two workers in a baggage handling area.

1985 was surely the darkest year in aviation history, marred by over two dozen crashes. With 329 fatalities, the destruction of flight 182 wasn’t even the deadliest disaster that summer. In August, 520 people would die in the crash of Japan Airlines flight 123.

 
Photo by John McArthur, courtesy of Unsplash.