A search team located the plane wreckage and reinforcements are on the way, army spokesman Narayan Silwal said on Monday. No information was initially given about the fate of the 22 inmates, including two Germans.
Air traffic control lost contact with the machine around 10 a.m. on Sunday morning, police spokesman Bishnu Kumar KC told the German press agency dpa. The plane of the Nepalese airline Tara Air was with 19 passengers and three crew members on the way from Pokhara – a popular tourist destination around 200 kilometers west of Kathmandu – to Jomsom.
“There are four Indians, two Germans and 16 Nepalese nationals on the plane,” said the police spokesman. The Foreign Ministry in Berlin said on Sunday that the German embassy in Kathmandu was making every effort to clarify the matter and was in contact with the Nepalese authorities.
Bad weather made the search difficult
According to military information, the search for the machine was interrupted for the night. The reason was bad weather and darkness, said the spokesman for the Nepalese military, Narayan Silwal, on Twitter on Sunday.
Even before dark, visibility was poor due to the weather and made the search difficult, police spokesman Min Bahadur Ghale said. In addition to helicopters, rescuers also tried to locate the machine around Mount Dhaulagiri – the seventh highest mountain in the world – on foot, it said. It has been raining heavily in parts of the country for the past week.
According to the Nepali Times, the missing plane is a 43-year-old Twin Otter 9N-AET.
Popular hiking region in the Himalayas
Pokhara is the starting point for numerous trekking tours, including the Annapurna Circuit. The Annapurna massif is a popular hiking region in the Himalayan country. The Pokhara-Jomsom flight route is considered one of the most accident-prone routes in Nepal. At least 74 people have died in five plane crashes on this route since 1997, according to the Nepali Times.
In February 2016, 23 people died in a crash on the route. A Tara Air propeller plane crashed in the mountainous region of central Nepal, and the burned-out wreck was later discovered on a mountain. Nobody had survived. The machine had previously disappeared on the way from Pokhara to Jomsom.
Source: Nachrichten
