Search teams retrieved the flight data and cockpit voice recorders Monday of a passenger plane that crashed on approach to a new airport in Nepal’s Himalayan foothills, officials said. At least 69 of the 72 people aboard were killed in the crash, whose cause is unknown.
Rescuers are still searching the debris, which is scattered down a 300-meter (984-foot) gorge, for the three missing people who are believed to be dead.
Many of the passengers on Sunday’s flight were returning home to Pokhara, though the city is also popular with tourists since it’s the gateway to the Annapurna Circuit hiking trail. A pharmaceutical marketing agent was traveling to be with his sister as she gave birth, and a minister of a Korean religious group was visiting the school he founded.
On Monday evening, relatives and friends were still gathered outside a local hospital. Many consoled one another, while some shouted at officials to speed up the post mortems so they could take the bodies of their loved ones home for funerals.religion by his brother. He studied the religion for years at a South Korean university before becoming a minister in 2009. He then returned to Nepal and established a school in the Lumbini province in 2013 where children received English, Korean and information technology instruction. Park said Paudel was returning to Nepal for work related to the school, called the Vishow Ekata Academy.
The Civil Aviation Authority said that 41 people have been identified. Gyan Khadka, a police spokesperson in the district, said the bodies would be handed over to family after officials finish post mortem reports.
The type of plane involved, the ATR 72, has been used by airlines around the world for short regional flights since the late 1980s. In Taiwan, two accidents involving ATR 72-500 and ATR 72-600 aircrafts in 2014 and 2015 led to the planes being grounded for a period.
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. ATR has not responded to a request for comment.According to the Safety Matters Foundation’s data, there have been 42 fatal plane crashes in Nepal since 1946.
Sunday’s crash is the country’s deadliest since 1992, when all 167 people aboard a Pakistan International Airlines plane were killed when it plowed into a hill as it tried to land in Kathmandu.
The European Union has banned airlines from Nepal from flying into the 27-nation bloc since 2013, citing weak safety standards. In 2017, the International Civil Aviation Organization cited improvements in Nepal’s aviation sector, but the EU continues to demand administrative reforms.
