Plane missing in Nepal, 22 on board
KATHMANDU — A small passenger plane carrying 22 people went missing shortly after taking off from an airport in eastern Nepal on Wednesday, the civil aviation authority said.Air traffic control said they lost contact with the pilot around 10 minutes after the Twin Otter plane took off from Lamidanda, a small airstrip in the mountainous east of the country, bound for the capital Kathmandu.
"A passenger plane has gone missing in eastern Nepal. We have alerted the emergency services and a search and rescue effort is under way," Ram Prasad Neupane, head of the civil aviation authority, told AFP.
Two army helicopters have flown to the remote area to search for the plane, which belongs to a small domestic airline, Tara Air, but the civil aviation authority said fading light was hampering the operation.
An army and police rescue team is being sent out to conduct a ground search, the authority's safety director Binod Puri told AFP.
Aviation accidents are relatively common in mountainous Nepal. Last month a helicopter crashed near Mount Everest during a mission to rescue two stranded climbers, killing the pilot and an engineer.
In August, a plane headed for the Everest region crashed in bad weather killing all 14 people on board, including four Americans, a Japanese and a British national.
An investigation blamed the crash on a power failure. It said the plane's generator failed and the pilot did not follow the proper procedures to conserve the remaining battery power.
Tara Air is a subsidiary of Yeti Airlines, a privately-owned domestic airline founded in 1998 which runs a service to many far-flung destinations across Nepal.
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