At least 18 people were killed when a small plane crashed and caught fire while it was taking off from Nepal’s capital Kathmandu on Wednesday, officials said.
The Saurya Airlines flight was heading to Pokhara on a test flight with a crew of two and 17 members of the airline’s technical staff on board, including a Yemeni.
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The plane went off the runway of Tribhuvan International Airport at 11.11 am, before catching fire and plunging into a gorge, Subhash Jha, director of the airport operations department, told media.
Out of the 19 people on board, 18 have been killed. However, the pilot survived and is being treated at a hospital.
Television visuals showed firefighters trying to put out the fire and thick black smoke rising into the sky, international reported.
Saurya operates domestic flights in Nepal with two Bombardier CRJ-200 regional jets, both around 20 years old, according to Flight Radar 24.
Remember that, Nepal has a poor aviation record and has suffered a spate of flight disasters in recent years.
There have been 27 deadly plane crashes in the country over the past three decades killing more than 600 people, according to the Aviation Safety database.
In December, the EU extended a decade-long ban on Nepali airlines in its airspace, saying they did not meet international aviation safety standards.
In January last year, 72 people were killed when a Yeti Airlines flight crashed near the city of Pokhara.
The plane plunged into a 300-metre gorge shortly before it was due to land. It was the country’s deadliest plane crash since 1992 when 167 people were killed on a Pakistan Airlines flight that crash-landed in Kathmandu.
In 2018, 51 people died during a crash-landing at Tribhuvan International Airport.
Nepal, a country of about 30 million people, sits in the Himalayas and is home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountains including Mount Everest, Kanchenjunga and Annapurna.
While it attracts vast numbers of tourists for trekking and mountaineering, its airports are small and of poor standards. There is also poor maintenance of equipment and lax enforcement of regulations.
