A small passenger plane with 22 people on board went missing on Sunday with cloudy weather in Nepal, and authorities suspended the search in difficult terrain when night fell.
“The search operation has been suspended for today due to the darkness,” police spokesman Bishnu Kumar KC told Reuters. “We have not been able to move forward. The search will resume early tomorrow.”
Officials said bad weather and mountainous terrain had hampered their efforts to locate the plane, a privately owned Tara Air De Havilland Canada DHC-6-300 Twin Otter.
The plane took off in the morning for a 20-minute flight, but lost contact with the control tower five minutes before landing, government officials said.
The plane left the tourist city of Pokhara, 125 kilometers west of the capital, Kathmandu. He was heading to Jomsom, a popular tourist and pilgrimage site about 80 miles (80 km) northwest of Pokhara.
Nepal State Television said villagers had seen a plane set on fire at the source of the Lyanku Khola River, at the foot of the Himalayan mountain Manapathi, in a district bordering Tibet.
This brochure image taken in Simikot, Nepal, in 2021 shows a Tara Air DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft with the queue number 9N-AET, the same number as the aircraft that has now disappeared. (Madhu Thapa / Handout / Reuters)
“Ground search teams are moving in that direction,” Tara Air spokesman Sudarshan Gartaula told Reuters, referring to the scene of the fire. “It could be a fire from the villagers or the shepherds. It could be anything.”
The Nepal Civil Aviation Authority also said a team was heading to the area.
The airline said the plane was carrying four Indians, two Germans and 16 Nepalese, including three crew members.
The flight tracking website Flightradar24 said that the missing plane, with registration number 9N-AET, made its first flight in April 1979.
A man is looking inside the Tara Air counter at a Kathmandu national airport in Nepal on Sunday after one of his planes went missing on his way to Jomsom. (Navesh Chitrakar / Reuters)
The weather office said there had been thick clouds in the Pokhara-Jomson area since morning.
Nepal, home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountains, including Everest, has a record number of air crashes. Its climate can change suddenly and the runways are usually in hard-to-reach mountainous areas.
In early 2018, a US-Bangla Airlines flight from Dhaka, Bangladesh, to Kathmandu crashed and landed, killing 51 of the 71 people on board.
In 1992, all 167 people aboard a Pakistan International Airlines plane were killed when it crashed into a hill while trying to land in Kathmandu.