“All the bodies have now been found,” Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Deo Chandra Lal Karn told AFP. “We are going to proceed to the identification of the bodies”.
Tara Air’s twin-engine Twin Otter took off on Sunday morning from the city of Pokhara, Nepal’s second largest city, 200 km west of the capital Kathmandu, before losing radio contact.
He was heading to Jomsom, a popular area for trekkers in the Himalayas, a 20-minute flight from Pokhara.
The wreckage was found the next day, scattered on a mountainside at 4,420 meters above sea level, with the bodies of 21 of the 22 passengers.
Ten of the 22 remains were transported to Kathmandu on Monday. Bad weather conditions hampered the continuation of the operation.
Nearly 60 people were involved in the search – soldiers, police, mountain guides and local residents – and had to climb for miles to reach the crash site. Many have camped at the site.
The causes of the accident remain to be determined. A spokesman for Pokhara airport, Dev Raj Subedi, assured Monday that the device had not caught fire in the sky.
In addition to 16 Nepalese, including three crew members, the aircraft was carrying two Germans in their fifties and four Indians. The latter were a divorced couple and their children aged 15 and 22, on a family trip.
According to the Aviation Safety Network website, the aircraft was manufactured by Canadian company De Havilland and first flew more than 40 years ago in 1979.
– Aviation safety –
Tara Air is a subsidiary of Yeti Airlines, a private domestic airline serving many remote areas of Nepal.
Nepalese civil aviation has boomed in recent years, transporting tourists, walkers and mountaineers, as well as goods, to remote and hard-to-reach places by road.
Nepal, an impoverished country in the Himalayas, has a dismal aviation safety record due to insufficient pilot training and maintenance.
The European Union has banned access to its airspace to all Nepalese airlines for security reasons.
The country also has some of the most dangerous airstrips in the world, located among snow-capped peaks.
In March 2018, a plane belonging to the Bangladeshi company US-Bangla Airlines crashed near Kathmandu airport, killing 51 people.
The deadliest accident dates back to 1992: 167 people were killed on board a Pakistan International Airlines flight near Kathmandu airport.
Two months earlier, a Thai Airways plane crashed in the same area, killing 113 people.
