No survivors from Nepal plane crash as black box and final body recovered from mountain

Offiicals have retrieved the last of the 22 bodies of the people who died in Nepal after a plane crashed in a mountainous area in the country.

The plane had been reported missing soon after take off on Sunday and its wreckage was found by the army in the country’s Mustang district a day later.

Twenty-one bodies were recovered on Monday, of which 10 have been taken by Nepal’s army to the base station of the search operation.

Authorities on Tuesday said they had found the last remaining body as well as one of the plane’s “black boxes” – the cockpit voice recorder.

“The last dead body has been recovered. Arranging to bring the remaining 12 dead bodies from the crash site to Kathmandu,” Nepal Army spokesperson brigadier general Narayan Silwal tweeted.

Modern planes usually have another another black box, known as a flight data recorder. The plane in question had reportedly been in operation for 43 years.

Deochandra Lal Karna, a spokesperson for the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN), said “all 22 bodies have been collected from the accident site”.

The Canada-made DHC-6-300 plane had four Indians, two Germans and 16 Nepali citizens on board when it took off for a 20-minute flight from the resort town of Pokhara, 200km west of capital Kathmandu, to the mountain town of Jomsom.

The turboprop Twin Otter aircraft lost contact with the airport tower minutes after flying over an area of deep river gorges and mountaintops.

The wreckage of the plane was tracked with the help of the cell phone of the plane captain which was ringing even after the crash.

“The cell phone of Captain Ghimire of the missing aircraft has been ringing and Nepal Army’s helicopter has landed in the possible accident area after tracking the captain’s phone from Nepal Telecom,” Prem Nath Thakur, general manager of Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport was quoted as saying to the MyRepublica newspaper on Monday.

Sudarshan Bartaula, a spokesperson of Tara Air, said on Monday that the plane had slammed onto the mountain and had broken into pieces.

“The impact has blown the bodies all over the hill,” he was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India news agency.

Nepal’s president Bidya Devi Bhandari and prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba have offered their condolences for the plane’s crew and passengers.

A five-member commission of inquiry headed by senior aeronautical engineer Ratish Chandra Lal Suman has been formed by the government to probe the cause of the crash, reported The Telegraph.

Nepal has a record of air accidents as it is home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountains, including Mount Everest.

In 2016, a Tara airlines Twin Otter plane flying the same route had crashed, killing all 23 aboard.

In 2018, a US-Bangla Air crash occurred at the Tribhuvan International Airport, killed 51 people on board.

In 2012, a Sita Air flight crashed while making an emergency landing at the same airport killing 19 people.