Nepal plane crash kills all 19 on board–police

KATHMANDU – A small aircraft taking tourists on a sightseeing trip around Mount Everest crashed in Nepal on Sunday, killing all 19 people on board, officials said.

The Buddha Air Beechcraft plane carrying 10 Indian passengers, three other foreign tourists, three locals and three Nepali crew crashed into a hillside in heavy rain and fog at Godavari, around 10 kilometres (six miles) from Kathmandu.

“All 19 people have died. The Buddha Air-103 was returning from a mountain flight when it crashed into Kotdada Hill,” said Bimlesh Lal Karna, head of the rescue department at Tribhuwan International Airport.

Police spokesman Binod Singh told AFP one person had initially survived the crash but had died in hospital.

“The rescue efforts have been hampered by heavy rain,” he added.

Airport authorities on the ground lost contact with the plane at 7:30am and it crashed four minutes later.

Local television stations reported that witnesses saw flames coming from the aircraft just before it crashed.

Buddha Air was not immediately available for comment.

The company offers an “Everest Experience” package, taking tourists from Kathmandu and flying them around the world’s tallest mountain.

The Buddha Air website describes the Beechcraft as the “safest plane operating in the domestic sector”.

Air travel is popular in Nepal, which has only a very limited road network. Many communities, particularly in the mountains and hills, are accessible only on foot or by air.

Aviation accidents are relatively common, particularly during the summer monsoon, when visibility is usually at its worst.

A Twin Otter plane carrying three crew and 19 passengers, including one American, smashed into a mountainside shortly after taking off from a small airstrip 140 kilometres east of Kathmandu in December last year.

The passengers were mostly Bhutanese citizens on a religious tour of Nepal and had chartered the Tara Air plane to take them to a Buddhist holy site in the area.

The plane’s black box data recorder was recovered and the government set up two separate inquiries, one into the cause of the accident and one into how the Bhutanese chartered a flight using false names.

In November last year a helicopter crashed near Mount Everest during a mission to rescue two stranded climbers, killing the pilot and an engineer.

Three months earlier, a plane headed for the Everest region crashed in bad weather killing all 14 people on board, including four Americans, a Japanese and a British national.

An investigation blamed that crash on a power failure. It said the plane’s generator failed and the pilot did not follow the proper procedures to conserve the remaining battery power.