Aircraft with 72 onboard crashes mins before landing in Nepal, 68, including 5 Indians, dead

Nepal's Civil Aviation Authority on Sunday (January 15) said that 68 passengers on board the ATR-72 Yeti Airlines flight, which crashed somewhere between the old airport of Pokhara region and the Pokhara International Airport, were confirmed dead.

The Nepalese passenger plane, which crashed into a river gorge with 72 people onboard, was an ATR-72 aircraft, in the first instance that such a model met with an accident in Nepal’s chequered aviation history.

The ill-fated Yeti Airlines' 9N-ANC ATR-72 aircraft took off from Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport at around 10:33 am for the 25-minute journey and crashed on the bank of the Seti River between the old airport and the new airport in Pokhara, minutes before landing, according to the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal.

A total of 68 passengers, including five Indians, and four crew members were on board the aircraft.

The ATR-72 is a twin-engine turboprop, short-haul regional airliner developed in France and Italy by aircraft manufacturer ATR, a joint venture between French aerospace company Aerospatiale and Italian aviation conglomerate Aeritalia.

The number “72” in its name is derived from the



aircraft’s typical standard seating capacity of 72 passengers. Currently, only Buddha Airlines and Yeti Airlines employ ATR-72 aircraft in Nepal.

Jagannath Niraula, spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal said this was the first accident of an ATR-72 aircraft in Nepal, according to MyRepublica newspaper. Sunday’s incident was Nepal’s deadliest plane crash in more than 30 years, according to data from the Aviation Safety Network.

Flight tracking website FlightRadar24 claimed that the Yeti Airlines aircraft was 15 years old and equipped with an 'old transponder with unreliable data'. There is no information about any survivor so far, said Sudarshan Bartaula, spokesperson at Yeti Airlines. 

Nepal has had a fraught record of aviation accidents, partly due to its sudden weather changes and airstrips located in hard-to-access rocky terrains.

The Nepal government has declared a national holiday tomorrow to mourn the deaths of the people on board the Yeti plane crash today. Nepal President Bidhya Devi Bhandari took to her Twitter handle to offer condolences to the passengers and crew members who lost their lives. She also expressed condolences to the bereaved families.