LONDON – One of Nepal’s Tara Air aircraft has unfortunately crashed in the Himalayas after the flight carrying 22 passengers reportedly went missing.
Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Deo Chandra Lal Karn told the BBC on Monday.”We have found 20 dead bodies, the body of an additional person has been located and rescuers are trying to retrieve it from difficult mountain terrain.”
The Nepali Army has posted the pictures confirming the plane has crashed Crash site: Sanosware, Thasang-2, Mustang pic.twitter.com/OcN93N1Qyb— NASpokesperson (@NaSpokesperson) May 30, 2022
According to the Spokesperson of the Nepal Army Narayan Silwal, search and rescue troops have found the crashed aircraft in Sanosware, Thalang-2, Mustang.
The unfortunate announcement came after the Airline Operators Association of Nepal (AOAN) made a statement 29th of May: “We can confirm that the location is near Larjung. But we don’t have more details,” Yograj Sharma Kandel, the spokesperson of the association, told Himal Press.
“Ground forces are heading toward the area. Because of difficult topography, even they are facing difficulty.”
The plane that crashes was a Tara Air De Havilland Canada DHC-6/300 Twin Otter aircraft that went missing in a mountainous area in Nepal on May 29, 2022.
The aircraft was registered as 9N-AET, and took off from Pokhara Airport (PKR) at 9:53 AM, according to Flightradar24.com. The aircraft was bound for Jomson Airport (JMO).
It lost contact with the airport tower at 10.07 AM. The aircraft was carry 19 passengers and three crew members.
The Twin-Otter departed from Nepal’s second-largest town of Pokhara, 125km west of the capital, Kathmandu. It was headed for Jomsom, which is about 80km northwest of Pokhara and is a popular tourist and pilgrimage site.
Onboard the doomed flight, there were sixteen Nepalis, four Indians, and two Germans. Search operations have been largely undermined by bad weather and mountainous terrain.
There are about 60 people working at the crash site, including the army, police, mountain guides, and locals. Most of whom trekked for miles on foot to get there.
Nepal has a horrible record of aviation accidents, and most of them have been fatal. This is frequently due to the treacherous terrain of Nepal and the sudden change in weather patterns.
The airstrips and airports are often located on terrains and they are difficult to access. In early 2018, a Bangladesh Q400, US-Bangla airlines flight carrying 71 souls from Dhaka in Bangladesh crash-landed in Kathmandu and caught fire which killed 51 lives onboard.
This was attributed to bad weather and navigational error. More recently, three people lost their lives in an accident in mid-2019 where a passenger aircraft (Czech Built) Let turboprop of Summit Air, veered off the runway and collided with a parked helicopter.
These are one of the few accidents that were recently picked, and there are much more accidents involving the crashed Twin Otter.
The flight plan:
This is a developing story.
