KATHMANDU (May 30) (Reuters) – Nepal’s hopes of finding 22 survivors aboard a small plane that crashed a day earlier into a Himalayan mountain faded in Nepal on Monday, officials said. with only two people to explain.
Two Germans, four Indians and 16 Nepalis were on board the De Havilland Canada DHC-6-300 Twin Otter, which crashed 15 minutes after taking off from the tourist town of Pokhara, 125 km (80 miles) away. west of Kathmandu, Sunday morning.
“There is very little chance of finding survivors,” said Deo Chandra Lal Karna, a spokesman for Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority.
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Nepalese soldiers and rescue workers had recovered 20 bodies from the wreckage, scattered over a steep slope at an altitude of about 14,500 feet.
Difficult terrain and bad weather had made research groups difficult. An image published in Nepalese media showed uniformed rescue workers moving a body from the wreckage and using ropes to carry it with a stretcher down a steep, grassy ridge.
“There is a very thick cloud in the area,” Netra Prasad Sharma, the highest-ranking bureaucrat in the Mustang district where the crash took place, told Reuters by telephone. “The search for bodies is underway.”
In Kathmandu, relatives of the victims were waiting for the bodies to be returned from the crash site, and the aviation authority said in a tweet that the formal identification of the victims had yet to be carried out.
“I’m waiting for my son’s body,” Maniram Pokhrel told Reuters in a muffled voice. His son Utsav Pokhrel, 25, was the co-pilot.
Operated by privately owned Tara Air, the plane crashed into cloudy weather on Sunday morning and the Nepalese army did not detect the wreckage until Monday morning. Read more
The destination was Jomsom, a popular tourist and pilgrimage site located about 80 km (50 miles) northwest of Pokhara, usually a 20-minute flight.
But the plane lost contact with the Pokhara control tower five minutes before it landed, airline officials said. Read more
The crash site is located near Nepal’s border with China, in the region where Mount Dhaulagiri is located, the seventh highest peak in the world at 8,167 meters (26,795 feet).
The flight tracking website Flightradar24 said the plane, with registration number 9N-AET, made its first flight 43 years ago.
Air crashes are not uncommon in Nepal, where there are eight of the 14 highest mountains in the world, including Everest, as the weather can change suddenly, making runways in the mountains dangerous.
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.
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Report by Gopal Sharma; Written by Devjyot Ghoshal and Krishna N. Das; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, Kenneth Maxwell and Simon Cameron-Moore
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