A small passenger plane operated by a private airline went missing in the mountains of Nepal on Sunday with 22 people on board during cloudy weather, and officials said search crews had been sent to the scene of a fire detected by the local residents.
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.
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. It was operated by Tara Air.
“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 (CAAN) 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 plane flew from the tourist city of Pokhara, about 125 kilometers west of the capital, Kathmandu. Heading for Jomsom, about 80 km northwest of Pokhara, is a popular tourist and pilgrimage site.
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)
The flight tracking website Flightradar24 reported that the missing De Havilland Canada DHC-6-300 Twin Otter aircraft with registration number 9N-AET made its first flight in April 1979.
“A search helicopter returned to Jomsom due to bad weather without locating the plane,” CAAN said in a statement.
“The helicopters are ready to search from Kathmandu, Pokhara and Jomsom once the weather conditions improve. Army and police search teams have marched to the site.”
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 to Kathmandu crashed on the landing and caught fire, 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.