Nepal plane crash kills all 23 people aboard

By Deepak Adhikari

KATHMANDU

A small plane carrying Nepalese passengers and two foreign nationals crashed in Nepal Wednesday morning, killing everybody on board, local officials have said.

The Tara Air twin otter, carrying 20 passengers and three Nepalese crewmembers, took off from the town of Pokhara at 7:50am local time and went missing only minutes later, according to Tara Air spokesman Bhim Raj Rai.

"All 23 people on board were killed in the crash. The police reached the crash site in the hills after choppers couldn’t land due to bad weather," Rai told Anadolu Agency.

"There were 18 Nepalis -- including an infant, a Chinese and a Kuwaiti -- on the plane," Rai said.

"The weather in Pokhara and Jomsom [the town to which the plane had been flying] was good, but it had deteriorated in the area where the crash occurred," he added.

The plane crashed in a mountainous region between Nepal’s northwestern Myagdi and Mustang areas.

Earlier, dozens of Nepalese army personnel and policemen had been deployed to scour the hills over which the aircraft went missing.

Pokhara is a popular tourist town in western Nepal. Jomsom, the town to which the plane was flying when it disappeared, lies close to China’s Tibetan region and is popular among trekkers and Hindu pilgrims.

Plane crashes are relatively common in mountainous Nepal.

Last June, a helicopter flying an aid mission following a series of earthquakes crashed in the country’s northeast killing six U.S. marines and seven other people.

In 2014, a twin otter turboprop operated by the state-run Nepal Airlines -- which had likewise taken off from Pokhara en route to Jomsom -- crashed into a hillside, killing all 18 people aboard.

Tara Air, a subsidiary of Yeti Airlines, purchased the ill-fated aircraft last September, according to Rai.

Nepal’s Kathmandu Post newspaper on Wednesday quoted eyewitnesses who found the crash wreckage as saying "the plane was burning".