KATHMANDU: Eighteen people were killed when a small passenger plane belonging to Nepal’s Saurya Airlines crashed and caught fire while taking off from the capital Kathmandu on Wednesday (Jul 24), officials said.
The plane, carrying two crew members and 17 technicians, was going for regular maintenance to Nepal’s new Pokhara airport, which opened in January last year and is equipped with aircraft maintenance hangars, they said.
“Shortly after takeoff … the aircraft veered off to the right and crashed on the east side of the runway,” the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal said in a statement.
The crash once again focused attention on the poor air safety record of the impoverished, landlocked Himalayan nation that is wedged between India and China and is heavily dependent upon air connectivity due to its limited road network.
Nearly 350 people have died in plane or helicopter crashes in the country since 2000.
Nepal’s prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, visited the crash site and asked people to “be patient” in a social media post, without elaborating. An emergency cabinet meeting was called to form a panel to probe the crash, a government spokesman said.
Eighteen of those on board the crashed 50-seater CRJ-200 aircraft, with the registration 9N-AME, were Nepali citizens while one engineer was from Yemen, Saurya said.
“Only the captain was rescued alive and is receiving treatment at a hospital,” said Tej Bahadur Poudyal, the spokesman for Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport.
Television visuals showed fire fighters trying to put out the blaze and thick black smoke rising into the sky. Images also showed the plane flying a little above the runway and then tilting to its right before it crashed.
