By Upendra Man Singh and Sheikh Saaliq -
The Associated Press
Sixty-eight people died in Nepal on Sunday after a passenger plane covering a regional route crashed into a gorge with 72 passengers on board as it approached a newly opened airport in the resort town of Pokhara, authorities confirmed. .
It is the
worst plane crash in Nepal in three decades.
The Civil Aviation Authority announced the death toll on Twitter on Sunday as rescuers searched the crash site near the Seti River, about 1.6 kilometers (a mile) from Pokhara International Airport.
Rescuers used ropes to pull the bodies out of the fuselage, which was partially suspended over the edge of the ravine.
The firefighters transferred some charred bodies to hospitals where relatives of the victims had gathered.
Tek Bahadur KC, an administrative officer in Kaski district, said
more bodies were expected to be found at the bottom of the cliff
.
It is not yet clear what caused the accident.
Rescuers and Nepalese civilians gather around the wreckage of the plane that crashed in Pokhara, Nepal. Krishna Mani Baral / AP
The ATR 72 twin-engine plane, operated by the Nepalese company Yeti Airlines, carried 68 passengers from the capital, Kathmandu, a 27-minute journey.
Also on board were 15 foreign nationals and four crew members, according to a statement from the Nepal Civil Aviation Authority.
The foreigners were five Indians, four Russians, two South Koreans, one Irishman, one Australian, one Argentinean, and one Frenchman.
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The Prime Minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who went to the airport after the accident, formed a commission to investigate the event.
Residents of the area observe the wreckage of the plane while rescue teams search for survivors at the crash site. Krishna Mani Baral / AP
“The incident was tragic.
The full force of the Nepalese army (and) the police has been deployed for the rescue,” he stated.
The South Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was still trying to confirm the status of two South Korean passengers, saying it had dispatched personnel to the scene.
The ATR 72, an aircraft involved in other fatal accidents
Airlines around the world frequently use that model of aircraft, the ATR 72, for short flights.
Introduced in the late 1980s by a French and Italian initiative,
it has been implicated in several fatal accidents over the years
.
In 2018, an ATR 72 of the Iranian company Aseman Airlines crashed in a mountainous area in the middle of the fog.
All 65 people on board died.
The ATR-72 model has been involved in other fatal accidents.
In the image, a plane similar to the one that crashed in Nepal.
File photo July 19, 2022. JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP via Getty Images
ATR identified the crashed plane on Sunday as an ATR 72-500 in a tweet.
The device was 15 years old and "equipped with an old transponder with unreliable data," according to data from the flight-tracking service flightradar24.com.
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Before moving to the Yeti Airlines fleet in 2019, it had been managed by Kingfisher Airlines of India and Nok Air of Thailand, according to Airfleets.net records.
Yeti Airlines has six ATR72-500 aircraft, according to Sudarshan Bartaula, a company spokesman.
Nepal, a country with a long history of plane crashes
Pokhara, 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of Kathmandu, is the gateway to the Annapurna Circuit, a popular climbing route in the Himalayas.
Its international airport began operating just two weeks ago.
It was built with Chinese financial and technical support.
The Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, said in a tweet that he was "very shocked" by the news of the accident and expressed condolences to him.
The crashed plane was operated by the Nepalese company Yeti Airlines and carried 68 passengers on a trip that was supposed to last 27 minutes.
Yunish Gurung/AP
Sunday's accident is the deadliest in Nepal since 1992,
when 167 people aboard a Pakistan International Airlines plane were killed in a crash into a hillside while trying to land in Kathmandu.
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Home to eight of the world's 14 highest mountains including Everest, Nepal has a patchy record on air safety.
Since 1946 there have been 42 fatal plane crashes in Nepal, according to the Aviation Safety database of the Aviation Safety Foundation.
Twenty-two people died last year when a plane crashed into a mountain in Nepal.
In 2018, a US-Bangla passenger plane departing from Bangladesh crashed on landing in Kathmandu, killing 49 of the 71 people on board.
