Nepal plane crashes on take-off, all 19 people on board killed, including ticketless flyer

All the 19 people including three crew members on board a Dornier Aircraft bound to Lukla, the nearest airport to the Mt Everest Base camp were killed as it met with an accident barely two minutes after it took off from the domestic airport here. The Sita Air plane had seven Britons, Five Chinese and seven Nepalis including the members of the crew, according to the Civil Aviation Department sources.

View pictures (warning: some pictures are extremely disturbing)

The plane that took off around 6.30 crash landed on the bank of Manohara river, barely 3-km away and the plane descended down, engulfed by fire. "A probe is going to be ordered soon and we will not speculate about the cause at this moment," Civil aviation official said. Speculations at the moment vary from possibility of a bird-hit or an engine failure being the cause.

This is the second plane accident in Nepal in four months, the earlier one being at Jomsom, along Nepal-Tibet border. The frequency of the accident in Nepal's air-traffic has caused lot of concern among the foreigners, and at the same shows weak safety regulatory mechanism of the government.

A sizable number of western tourists coming to Nepal prefer to go for trekking up-mountains, and Lukla is the most favoured destination with a large number of regular as well as chartered flights in operation between Kathmandu and there.

The plane fell into the small empty space of the Jadibuti area with no damage caused to the settlement .

Deputy Inspector General of Police Narayan Bastakoti said the bodies of the victims have been recovered, and sent to the Hospital for postmortem.

Among the 16 passengers, who have died in the Dornier Aircraft 9N AHA D228 crash, were seven British, five Chinese and four Nepalese nationals, according to the Rescue Coordination Committee of the Tribhuvan International Airport.

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