Nepal plane crash: Rescuers resume search as day of mourning observed

Rescuers have resumed searching for four people still missing after Nepal’s deadliest plane crash in 30 years, officials have said.

The ATR 72 aircraft, operated by Yeti airlines, was carrying 72 people when it crashed in the tourist city of Pokhara minutes before landing in clear weather on Sunday.

Rescuers have so far recovered 68 bodies.

Nepal has declared Monday a day of mourning and has set up a panel to investigate the disaster and suggest measures to avoid such incidents in future.

It was not immediately clear what caused the accident.

The plane, on a scheduled flight from Nepal’s capital Kathmandu to Pokhara, the gateway to the scenic Annapurna mountain range, was carrying 57 Nepalis, five Indians, four Russians, two South Koreans, and one person each from Argentina, Ireland, Australia and France.

Pokhara police official Ajay KC said the search-and-rescue operation, which stopped because of nightfall on Sunday, has now resumed.

He said: “We will take out the five bodies from the gorge and search for the remaining four that are still missing.”

The other 63 bodies had been sent to a hospital, he said.

Rescuers have also been searching for the black boxes – a cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder – as they looked for survivors, a spokesperson for Nepal’s civil aviation authority said.

Authorities have said bodies will be handed over to families after identification and examination.

Images and videos shared on Twitter showed plumes of smoke billowing from the crash site as rescue workers, soldiers, and crowds of people gathered around the wreckage of the aircraft to find survivors.

The aircraft’s fuselage was split into multiple parts which were scattered down the gorge.

Tek Bahadur KC, a senior administrative officer in the Kaski district, said he expected rescue workers to find more bodies at the bottom of the gorge.

Local resident Bishnu Tiwari, who rushed to the crash site to help with the search, said rescue efforts were hampered because of thick smoke and a raging fire that engulfed the aircraft.

“The flames were so hot that we couldn’t go near the wreckage,” he said.

Gaurav Gurung, a witness, said he saw the aircraft spinning violently in the air after it began to attempt a landing.

He added he saw the plane fall nose-first towards its left and then crash into the gorge.

“The plane caught fire after the crash. There was smoke everywhere,” Mr Gurung said.

At the crash site near the Seti River, nearly a mile from Pokhara International Airport, rescuers sprayed fire hoses and heaved ropes down to another smouldering part of the wreck below.

The aviation authority said the plane last made contact with the airport from near Seti Gorge at 10.50am local time.

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who rushed to the airport after the crash, has 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.

The type of plane involved has been used by several 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 fatal accidents over the years.

In 2018, an ATR 72 operated by Iran’s Aseman Airlines crashed in a foggy, mountainous region, killing all 65 on board.

ATR identified the plane involved in Sunday’s crash as an ATR 72-500 in a tweet.

According to plane tracking data from flightradar24.com, the aircraft was 15 years old and “equipped with an old transponder with unreliable data”.

It was previously flown by India’s Kingfisher Airlines and Thailand’s Nok Air before Yeti took it over in 2019, according to records on Airfleets.net.

Yeti Airlines has a fleet of six ATR72-500 planes, company spokesman Sudarshan Bartaula said.

Sunday’s crash was Nepal’s deadliest since 1992, when all 167 people on board a Pakistan International Airlines plane were killed when it ploughed into a hill as it tried to land in Kathmandu.

Nearly 350 people have died since 2000 in plane or helicopter crashes in Nepal – home to eight of the world’s 14
highest mountains, including Everest – where sudden weather changes can make for hazardous conditions.