Kathmandu: A plane with 19 passengers, including four Indians, and three crew members went missing in Nepal on Sunday shortly after taking off, aviation authorities said.
In a statement, the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal said the Tara Airlines twin-otter plane was en route to Pokhara from Mustang.
A search operation is underway to locate the aircraft which went missing soon after it took off from the Jomsom Airport in Mustang, the airline said.
Of the 19 passengers, 13 were Nepalis, four Indians and two others whose nationalities were not immediately known.
Meanwhile, a Nepal Army helicopter has located the site where the small plane of a local airline with 22 people on board, including four Indians, has possibly crashed, media reports quoted the country’s civil aviation authority as saying on May 29.
A Nepal Army helicopter carrying 10 soldiers and two employees of the civil aviation authority landed on the bank of a river near the Narshang Monastery, the possible site of the crash, according to a local newspaper.
“A Nepal Army helicopter has landed on the riverbank near Narshang Gumba,” Prem Nath Thakur, general manager of the Tribhuvan International Airport was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
Interestingly, the airplane was located after Nepal Telecom tracked down the cellphone of the airplane’s pilot Captain Prabhakar Ghimire through the Global Positioning System (GPS) network.
“The cell phone of Captain Ghimire of the missing aircraft has been ringing and Nepal Army’s helicopter has landed in the possible accident area after tracking the captain’s phone from Nepal Telecom,” Thakur said.