Plane with 4 Indians among 22 people crashes in Nepal
| Date :30-May-2022 |
KATHMANDU,
THE fate of four members of an Indian family and 18 others onboard a small plane of a Nepalese airlines remained unclear after the aircraft crashed on Sunday in the mountainous region of the Himalayan nation minutes after taking off from the tourist city of Pokhara, officials said.
The Twin Otter 9N-AET plane belonging to Tara Air took off at 10.15 am from Pokhara, and lost contact with the control tower 15 minutes later, according to an airline spokesperson.
Nepali Army Major General Baburam Shrestha in the evening said that the plane was spotted in a state of burning at Laningchgola, an upper area of Larikota in Thasang Rural Municipality-2 in Mustang district, ‘The Rising Nepal’ newspaper reported.
The fate of the crew and passengers were immediately not known. There are four Indian nationals, two Germans and 13 Nepali passengers besides a three member Nepali crew, said Sudarshan Bartaula, a spokesperson at the airlines.
The airline issued the list of passengers which identified four Indians as Ashok Kumar Tripathy, his wife Vaibhavi Bandekar (Tripathi) and their children Dhanush and Ritika. The family is currently residing in Thane city near Mumbai. “Tara Air flight 9NAET that took off from Pokhara at 9.55 AM today with 22 people onboard, including 4 Indians, has gone missing. The embassy is in touch with their family. Our emergency hotline number :+977-9851107021,” the Indian embassy in Nepal tweeted.
The three member crew of the aircraft was led by captain Prabhakar Prasad Ghimire. Utsav Pokhrel is the co-pilot while Kismi Thapa is the air hostess, ‘My Republica newspaper’ reported, quoting Pokhara Airport Information Officer Dev Raj Adhikari. The aircraft was scheduled to land at Jomsom Airport in the Western mountainous region at 10.15 am. The aircraft lost contact with the tower from the sky above Ghorepani on the Pokhara-Jomsom air route, aviation sources said.
According to an air traffic controller at Jomsom Airport, they have an unconfirmed report about a loud noise in Ghasa of Jomsom. It was suspected that the aircraft crashed in the Dhaulagiri area. A Nepal Army helicopter carrying 10 soldiers and two employees of the civil aviation authority landed on the bank of a river near the Narshang Monastery, the possible site of the crash, Prem Nath Thakur, General Manager of the Tribhuvan International Airport, was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
Interestingly, the airplane was located after Nepal Telecom tracked down the cellphone of the airplane’s pilot Captain Prabhakar Ghimire through the Global Positioning System (GPS) network.
“The cell phone of Captain Ghimire of the missing aircraft has been ringing and Nepal Army’s helicopter has landed in the possible accident area after tracking the captain’s phone from Nepal Telecom,” Thakur said.