The plane crashed on Sunday, shortly before its landing planned for the new Pokhara airport, causing the death of at least sixty people. Since the year 2000, more than 300 people have perished in airplane or helicopter accidents in Nepal.
by Carole Dieterich (New Delhi, Correspondence)
The crash occurred just a few seconds before the planned landing of the device. The plane of the Nepalese company Yeti Airlines, an ATR 72 twin-engine carrier seventy-two people on board, including four crew members, crashed on Sunday, January 15, less than two kilometers from Pokhara International Airport where He had to land shortly before 11 am local time. The plane had taken off from the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, some 200 kilometers away for a flight of about thirty minutes. The last contact between the plane and the airport was recorded at 10:50 a.m. above the Seti river gorges. “Then he crashed,” the civil aviation authority said in a press release.
A video that has largely circulated on social networks probably shows the plane at the time of the crash. The device flies there at low altitude before suddenly bowing on the left, while the weather is visibly cleared. A powerful blast is then heard. Parts of the carcass were found, on fire, at the bottom of a 300 -meter -deep ravine. The plane was damaged between the old Pokhara airport and the new international terminal, inaugurated just two weeks earlier, the 1 er January and financed with a Chinese loan.
At least sixty-eight people died according to the Nepalese civil aviation authority, four were still missing on Monday morning. The plane was carrying fifty-three Nepalese and fifteen foreigners, including five Indians and one French. The tourist town of Pokhara is the front door for the treks of the Annapurna circuit in the Himalayas but also for pilgrims.
navigation complicated by the weather
This crash constitutes the deadliest air disaster of the last three decades in Nepal, where crashes are frequent. The worst accident dates back to 1992, when 167 people died not far from Kathmandu in the fall of a Pakistan International Airlines plane. That same year, two months earlier, 113 passengers from the Thai Airways had also perished near the same airport.
Since 1946, 42 fatal aircraft accidents have occurred in Nepal, according to the Flight Safety Foundation database. And, since the year 2000, more than 300 people have disappeared in airplane or helicopter accidents in the country.
The Sunday drama occurred while the last crash dates back to less than a year. In May 2022, a Twin Otter twin of the Nepalese company Tara Air, a subsidiary of Yeti Airlines, crashed shortly after his take -off from Pokhara, killing 22 people while going to Jomosom, another popular destination for trekking trekking . After this umpteenth drama, Kathmandu had strengthened his safety rules and planes are now authorized to take off only if the weather conditions are favorable throughout their route.
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