Content warning: This story contains visual descriptions and footage of a plane crash.
In June 2006, a small passenger plane crashed as it approached a local airport in Nepal to land, crashing to the ground “like a fireball”, eyewitnesses recount. Nepal Times. Co-pilot Dipak Pokhrel was killed along with two other crew members and six passengers.
On Sunday, more than 16 years after Pokhrel’s fatal crash, his widow, Anju Khatiwada, died when the plane she was co-piloting crash into a canyon right outside a newly built airport in Pokhara. Khatiwada is 44 years old.
A relative said she was “determined to become a pilot” after her husband’s death. New York Times. Against the wishes of his family, Khatiwada began training for a degree using the insurance payout from the accident. She was hired by Yeti Airlines in 2010, a company spokeswoman said. Reuters.
The spokesman said before Sunday’s crash, Khatiwada had 6,400 flight hours. The 24-minute journey from Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, to tourist paradise Pokhara is the route she has flown before.
“She is a brave woman with all her courage and determination. She left us too soon,” the spokesperson said. CNN.
As of Monday, Khatiwada’s body had not yet been pulled from the canyon, but authorities assumed she was dead. Of the 72 people on board the twin-engine plane ATR-72, the bodies of 69 people were found after two days of search and rescue operations, making it the deadliest plane crash in Nepal in three decades.
The flight was carrying 57 Nepalese, including four crew members, as well as five Indians, four Russians, two South Koreans and one each from Argentina, Ireland, Australia and France.
Four of the Indian passengers on the flight were friends, traveling together around Nepal from Ghazipur, a city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, district officials said. One of them, Sonu Jaiswal, was identified as the unfortunate passenger who accidentally livestreamed the crash on Facebook Live. Jaiswal, 29, a father of two, had come to Kathmandu to pray at a Hindu temple dedicated to the god Shiva, according to the Indian newspaper. Tribune.
Vishal Koswal, a close friend of the group, recounted guard that he talked to Jaiswal just hours before the accident via video. “Sonu showed us the surrounding mountains during the call and was clearly excited, so were we,” Koswal said. “He told me on that call that after landing in Pokhara, they would visit some temples there and then catch the train back home in the evening.”
The 100-second clip, widely shared on social media, shows moments before the Yeti Airlines crash, including Jaiswal in a yellow sweater as he looks out the window in the landscape below. When the plane jerked to the side, the phone’s camera slipped, although the passengers could still hear the screams. The flame then took over the screen.
Jaiswal’s father, Rajendra Prasad Jaiswal, told BBC he was too devastated to see the footage himself. “I just heard Sonu’s friends tell that story,” he said. “Our lives fell apart.” Elder Jaiswal was on his way to Nepal to identify his son’s body on Monday.
Another clip, shot from the ground by 33-year-old Pokhara resident Diwas Bohora, shows the doomed flight plummeting to the ground as it veered sharply towards the wing and disappeared from view. “I was shocked,” said Bohora, according to Related press. “I thought today it would all end here after it fell, I would die too.”
The cause of the accident is still under investigation. A representative for Yeti Airlines said flight data and the cockpit voice recorder were restored on Monday. The Nepalese government has appointed a five-member committee to conduct an investigation into the accident.
Sunday marks Nepal’s second plane crash in the past 12 months and is one of more than 30 fatal crashes recorded by Aviation safety net since the early 1990s. Since 2000, nearly 350 people have been killed in plane or helicopter crashes in this mountainous country, which has difficult terrain, unpredictable weather, fleets of aircraft Flight and outdated navigation technology all contribute to the challenges of flying. An unnamed pilot who regularly flies the type of plane involved in Sunday’s crash from India to Nepal told the AP that the ATR 72-500 can be “zero-tolerance” if the pilot is unskilled or unskilled. Be prepared for the conditions of the area.
