Dozens of people have been killed after a plane with 72 people on board crashed near an airport in central Nepal. It was the country's deadliest airplane accident in three decades.
The Associated PressRescuers gather at the site of the plane crash in Pokhara, Nepal, on Sunday.Tek Bahadur K. C., a senior administrative officer in the Kaski district, made the announcement Sunday while rescuers were scouring the crash site near the Seti River, about 1.6 kilometres from Pokhara International Airport.
The aviation authority said the aircraft last made contact with the airport from near Seti Gorge at 10:50 a.m. before crashing.Images and videos shared on Twitter showed plumes of smoke billowing from the crash site as rescue workers, Nepali soldiers, and crowds of people gathered around the wreckage of the aircraft to find survivors. The aircraft's fuselage was split into multiple parts that were scattered down the gorge.
"The incident was tragic. The full force of the Nepali army, police has been deployed for rescue," he said. ATR identified the plane involved in Sunday's crash as an ATR 72-500 in a tweet. According to plane tracking data from flightradar24.com, the aircraft was 15 years old and "equipped with an old transponder with unreliable data." It was previously flown by India's Kingfisher Airlines and Thailand's Nok Air before Yeti took it over in 2019, according to records on Airfleets.net. Yeti Airlines has a fleet of six ATR72-500 planes, company spokesperson Sudarshan Bartaula said.
Nepal, home to eight of the world's 14 highest mountains, including Mount Everest, has a history of air crashes. According to the Flight Safety Foundation's Aviation Safety database, there have been 42 fatal plane crashes in Nepal since 1946.
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