Nepalese rescuers have recovered the bodies of 22 people aboard a passenger plane that crashed in the Himalayas, authorities said on Tuesday to begin the process of identifying the victims.
“All the bodies have been found,” Deo Chandra Lal Karn, spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority, told AFP. “The process of identifying the bodies will be carried out,” he added.
Air traffic controllers lost contact with the Twin Otter plane operated by Nepalese airline Tara Air shortly after it took off from Pokhara in western Nepal on Sunday morning en route to Jomsom, a popular trekker destination.
The remains of the plane were found a day later, scattered at more than 4,000 meters of altitude.
Ten of the bodies were airlifted by helicopter to Nepal’s capital Kathmandu on Monday.
The remaining twelve remained at the accident site, which was difficult to access and affected by bad weather conditions that made evacuation difficult.
Some 60 people were deployed in the rescue mission including members of the army and the police, mountain guides and locals.
Most of them climbed kilometers to reach the crash site and many slept camping at high altitude.
The cause of the accident has yet to be elucidated. A Pokhara airport spokesman, Dev Raj Subedi, said on Monday the plane had not caught fire and appeared to have collided.
Four Indians, two Germans and 16 Nepalis were on board the aircraft. The four Indians were a divorced couple, their 15-year-old daughter and 22-year-old son, who were on vacation.
“There was a court order for the father to spend ten days with the family every year so they were away,” Indian police officer Uttam Sonawane told AFP.
According to the Aviation Safety Network website, the aircraft was manufactured by the Canadian company De Havilland and made its first flight more than 40 years ago, in 1979.
Tara Air is a subsidiary of Yeti Airlines, a privately owned national airline that flies to remote destinations in Nepal.
His last fatal accident was in 2016 on the same route, when a plane with 23 people on board crashed into a mountain.
Nepal’s airline industry has boomed in recent years, ferrying goods and people between hard-to-reach areas, as well as foreign hikers and climbers.
However, it suffers from significant safety issues due to lack of training and maintenance. The European Union has banned all Nepalese airlines from its airspace for security reasons.
In addition, the country has some of the most remote and difficult runways, surrounded by snowy peaks and changing weather conditions, where landing is a challenge for even the most skilled pilots.
