Monday, February 17, 2014, a tiny passenger plane crashed in the mountains of western Nepal in Kathmandu. All 18 people on board were killed due to the crash, authorities said.
The passenger plane was a Twin Otter aircraft. It left Sunday afternoon from the tourist town of Pokhara, about 200 kilometers (124 miles) west of Nepal's capital, Kathmandu.
The plane was headed for Jumla, a remote town around 600 kilometers (373 miles) northeast of Kathmandu, when it suddenly went missing.
A flight such as that normally takes an hour.
Bam Bahadur Bhandari, the regional police chief of Pokhara said, "Police have reached the crash site and no survivors have been found. The bodies are being collected."
They couldn't identify immediately the cause of the crash because the Twin Otter aircraft was flying in poor weather conditions since rain and snow has been constant across Nepal the past few days before the crash.
Bimlesh Karna, the deputy director of Nepal's civil aviation authority said, "The aircraft seems to have hit a mountain."
The 18 people who died on board were three crew members and a Danish national. Karna said that of the 17 Nepalese in the plane, unfortunately so, one was a child.
The Twin Otter aircraft was a 40-year-old Canadian-made aircraft and it belonged to the state-owned Nepal Airlines.
Because of the crash, concerns over Nepal's air safety records were raised. In this Himalayan country, each year from 2010 to 2012, there were already two fatal air crashes.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
