A Yeti Airlines plane with 72 people on board crashed in Nepal on Sunday, and the human toll has just passed this midday from 29 to 67 dead, police said.
“There are 68 passengers on board and four crew members…help is on the way,” Sudarshan Bartaula, spokesman for Yeti Airlines, said earlier. Three babies and three children are among the passengers. Fifteen foreigners were listed on the flight documents: five Indians, four Russians, two Koreans, an Irishman, an Argentinian and a Frenchman, company spokesman Sudrashan Bardaula said.
The plane, which took off from Kathmandu at 10:33 a.m. (5:33 a.m. French time), crashed 200 km from the Nepalese capital, in Nayagaun, between the old and the new airport of Pokhara, in the center of the country, in the gorges of the Seti River. The plane contacted the control tower at 10:50 a.m. before disappearing from radar. Emergency services were called at 11 a.m. The weather was clear.
Plane ‘broken to pieces’
The cabin was on fire, local official Gurudutta Dhakal said. “Rescue services have already arrived on site and are trying to put out the fire”, he added, specifying that they were “focused first on extinguishing the fire and on rescuing the passengers”. In the images posted on social networks, dozens of people are on site to help the rescue.
Already 36 bodies have already been found, according to India Today. According to army spokesman Krishna Bhandari, contacted by Reuters, the plane is “shattered into pieces”. Nepali Police Assistant Sub-Inspector Rudra Thapa confirmed to Kathmandu Post that 25 bodies have been taken to different hospitals in Pokhara for autopsy.
The plane was 15 years old, according to flight tracking site FlightRadar. The ATR72 is a popular twin-engine turboprop aircraft, manufactured by a company jointly owned by Airbus and the Italian company Leonardo. Yeti Airlines has a fleet of six ATR72-500 aircraft, according to its website.
On a video posted on social networks, we see him turning while losing altitude. “I saw the plane shaking, moving from left to right, then suddenly its nose dipped and it entered the throat,” Khum Bahadur Chhetri told Reuters, adding that local residents had taken two passengers in the hospital.
Nepal’s airline industry has boomed in recent years, transporting goods and people to hard-to-reach areas, as well as tourists for hiking and mountaineering. But it suffered from a lack of safety due to insufficient training and maintenance. The European Union has banned Nepalese airlines from its airspace since 2013, citing security concerns.
Among the toughest tracks in the world
The Himalayan country also has some of the most isolated and tricky tracks in the world, flanked by snow-capped peaks that challenge even seasoned pilots to approach. In this country of mountains – eight of the fourteen highest peaks in the world are there – the weather can change suddenly and make flying conditions dangerous. Aircraft operators claim that Nepal lacks the infrastructure to make accurate weather forecasts, especially in remote areas.
At least 309 people have died since 2000 in plane or helicopter crashes. In May 2022, all 22 people on board a plane operated by the Nepalese company Tara Air – 16 Nepalese, four Indians and two Germans – died when the plane crashed. Air traffic control had lost contact with the twin-propeller aircraft shortly after it took off from Pokhara heading for Jomsom, a popular trekking destination. Its wreckage was found a day later, on the side of a mountain at an altitude of about 4,400 meters. Around 60 people had taken part in the search mission, most of them having walked for miles to get there.
After this crash, the authorities tightened the regulations, in particular so that the planes are only allowed to fly if the weather forecast is favorable throughout the journey.
In March 2018, a US-Bangla Airlines plane crashed near the notoriously difficult to access Kathmandu International Airport, killing 51 people. The accident was the deadliest in Nepal since 1992, when all 167 people on board a Pakistan International Airlines plane died in a crash approaching Kathmandu.