At least 68 on board plane killed in fiery Nepal crash
4 remain missing in wreckage found at gorge near airport
POKHARA, Nepal — A plane making a 27-minute flight to a Nepal tourist town crashed into a gorge Sunday while attempting to land at a newly opened airport, killing at least 68 of the 72 people aboard.
At least one witness reported hearing cries for help from within the fiery wreck, the country’s deadliest airplane accident in three decades.
Hours after dark, scores of onlookers crowded around the crash site near the airport in the resort town of Pokhara as rescue workers combed the wreckage on the edge of the cliff and in the ravine below.
Officials suspended the search for the four missing people overnight and planned to resume looking Monday.
Local resident Bishnu Tiwari, who rushed to the crash site near the Seti River to help search for bodies, said the rescue efforts were hampered by thick smoke and a raging fire.
“The flames were so hot that we couldn’t go near the wreckage. I heard a man crying for help, but because of the flames and smoke, we couldn’t help him,” Tiwari said.
It was not clear what caused the accident, Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority said.
A witness said he saw the aircraft spinning violently in the air after it began descending to land, watching from the terrace of his house. Finally, Gaurav Gurung said, the plane fell nose-first toward its left and crashed into the gorge.
The aviation authority said the aircraft last made contact with the airport from near Seti Gorge at 10:50 a.m. before crashing.
The twin-engine ATR 72 aircraft, operated by Nepal’s Yeti Airlines, was flying from the capital, Kathmandu, to Pokhara, 125 miles west. It was carrying 68 passengers, including 15 foreign nationals, as well as four crew members, Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority said in a statement. The foreigners included five Indians, four Russians, two South Koreans,
and one each from Argentina, Australia, France and Ireland.
Images and videos shared on Twitter showed plumes of smoke billowing from the crash site, nearly a mile away from Pokhara International Airport. The aircraft’s fuselage was split into multiple parts.
Firefighters carried bodies, some burned beyond recognition, to hospitals where grief-stricken relatives had assembled.
At Kathmandu airport, family members appeared distraught as they were escorted in and at times exchanged heated words with officials as they waited for information.
Tek Bahadur K. C., a senior administrative officer in the Kaski district, said he expected rescue workers to find more bodies at the bottom of the gorge.
Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who rushed to Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu after the crash, set up a panel to investigate the accident. “The incident was tragic. The full force of the Nepali army, police has been deployed for rescue,” he said.
Pokhara is the gateway
to the Annapurna Circuit, a popular hiking trail in the Himalayas. The city’s new international airport began operations two weeks ago.
The type of plane involved, the ATR 72, has been used by airlines around the world for short regional flights. Introduced in the late 1980s by a French and Italian partnership, the model has been involved in several deadly accidents.
In Taiwan two earlier accidents involving ATR 72-500 and ATR 72-600 aircrafts happened months apart.
In July 2014, a TransAsia
ATR 72-500 flight crashed while trying to land on the scenic Penghu archipelago between Taiwan and China, killing 48 people onboard. An ATR 72-600 operated by the same Taiwanese airline crashed shortly after takeoff in Taipei in February 2015 after one of its engines failed and the second was shut down, apparently by mistake.
The 2015 crash, captured in footage that showed the plane striking a taxi as it hurtled out of control, killed 43, and prompted authorities to ground all Taiwanese-registered ATR 72s for
some time. TransAsia ceased all flights in 2016 and later went out of business.
ATR identified the plane involved in Sunday’s crash as an ATR 72-500 in a tweet. The aircraft was 15 years old and “equipped with an old transponder with unreliable data,” according to plane-tracking data from flightradar24.com.
Yeti Airlines has a fleet of six ATR 72-500 planes, company spokesperson Sudarshan Bartaula said.
Nepal is home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountains, including Mount Everest.