– Shortly after takeoff, the plane turned right and crashed on the east side of the runway, writes Nepal’s aviation authority in a press release shared on their website.
The accident occurred at Tribhuvan Airport in the capital city of Kathmandu just after 7 a.m. Norwegian time on Wednesday morning. Following the crash, the plane began to burn.
– A rescue operation was launched immediately, and 18 people were found dead. One seriously injured person was rescued and transported to the hospital, the press release states.
The plane caught fire after the crash.
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Except for one person from Yemen, all the deceased were Nepali.
The pilot survived, said police spokesperson Dan Bahadur Karki to the news agency AFP.
The plane belongs to the local airline Saurya Airlines. The airport is now open again.
The plane was completely destroyed when it crashed.
Photo: Prabin Ranabhat / AP
Aircraft Technicians on Board
A video posted on social media shows the plane crash on Wednesday. NRK has verified the video and timestamped it to Wednesday morning. In the foreground of the video, one can see a Qatar Airlines plane.
Police spokesperson Dan Bahadur Karki told AFP that the plane was headed to the city of Pokhara for maintenance work. All passengers were technicians employed by Saurya Airlines, according to police.
The flight route from Kathmandu to Pokhara is one of the busiest in Nepal.
The military in Nepal was quick to arrive to assist the police and fire department in the rescue efforts, they said in a statement. Images from the scene show soldiers working around the wreckage of the plane.
Older Planes
Saurya Airlines states on its website that they operate Bombardier CRJ 200 aircraft. The plane has a capacity of 50 passengers. The aviation authorities confirm that it was such an aircraft that crashed.
The aircraft was built in 2003, writes the flight monitoring service Flightradar24 on X.
Suitcases were retrieved from the plane wreckage and stacked in a field.
Photo: Sanjog Manadhar / AP
– It is a relatively older type of aircraft that has almost been phased out of traffic in the West, says aviation expert Espen Næss, who is behind Flypodden, to NRK.
He states that it is too early to determine the cause of the accident. However, the CRJ 200 is starting to age. It may have been in operation in various places before it ended up in Nepal. But there could be multiple causes for the accident, according to Næss:
– It could have been maintenance issues, pilot error, or they might have hit something on the runway, he says, emphasizing that this is purely speculation.
Accident-Prone Aviation Industry
Nepal has long struggled with poor safety in its aviation industry. Nepalese airlines are banned from flying in EU airspace.
Only the pilot survived the crash. 18 people were killed.
Photo: Sujan Gurung / AP
The capital city, Kathmandu, is located in the Kathmandu Valley between the Himalaya and Mahabharat mountains.
The areas around the Himalayas have some of the most challenging runways to navigate in the world. The weather can also change rapidly in the mountains.
– Unfortunately, there have been quite a number of accidents in Nepal in recent years, says Espen Næss.
The last major plane crash in Nepal occurred in January 2023. In that incident, all 72 passengers died when a Yeti Airlines plane crashed during landing in Pokhara.
A CRJ 200 plane also crashed in Norway in 2016. It was a Swedish-owned postal flight en route from Oslo to Tromsø. Two people lost their lives in the accident. Sweden’s Accident Investigation Authority concluded that a technical failure in the plane’s navigation systems led to the crash.
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