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Nepal has stopped efforts to search for and rescue a plane with 22 people missing on Sunday. An army spokesman cited “loss of daylight and bad weather” for the halt.
Air and ground forces will resume in the morning, an army spokesman said on Twitter at 7 p.m.
The plane, DHC-6-300 Twin Otter, operated by private airline Tara Air, disappeared shortly afterwards departure from Pokhara, in central Nepal, at 9:55 a.m. Sunday, according to the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu.
The plane was headed for Jomsom, near Nepal’s border with Tibet. The flight time had to be 20 minutes.
Tara Air told Reuters that the plane was carrying four Indian citizens, two Germans and 16 Nepalese, three of them crew members.
A Nepalese army spokesman said at around 2pm that military personnel and helicopters were “trying to find [the] an airplane thought to be “in and around Lete,” about 22 miles south of Jomsom.
But Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority said in a press release Sunday that at least one search helicopter had returned to Jomsom “due to bad weather without finding the plane,” according to Reuters.
“Helicopters are ready to take off in search of Kathmandu, Pokhara and Jomsom as weather conditions improve,” aviation officials said in a statement. “Army and police search teams have marched to the site.”
Tara Air’s 9NAET flight, which took off from Pokhara at 9.55 am today with 22 people on board, including 4 Indians, has disappeared. The search and rescue operation is included. The embassy keeps in touch with their family.
Our emergency hotline: + 977-9851107021. https://t.co/2aVhUrB82b
– IndiaInNepal (@IndiaInNepal) May 29, 2022
According to Flightradar24, a website that tracks real-time flights around the world, Tara Air’s flight has stopped broadcasting around Shikha, a mountainous area north of Pokhara. The plane lost contact with the control tower shortly after taking off on its short voyage from Pokhara, the Associated Press reported.
Twenty-three people died in 2016 when a Twin Otter plane operated by Tara Air and flying the same route from Pokhara to Jomsom crashed and was later found near a village about 30 miles south of Jomsom.
The International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN agency, audited the civil aviation industry in Nepal in 2017 and found that the country had achieved below average global results in accident investigations. Nepalese airlines are banned from flying in European Union airspace due to “lack of safety oversight by the aviation authorities” there.
At least 49 people have died in Nepal after a plane crash landed, officials said
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