Nepal plane crash kills 19 on board

Onlookers are seen near the wreckage of the Sita Air Dornier plane crash site in Manohara, on the outskirts of the Kathmandu yesterday. The small passenger plane carrying 19 people crashed on the outskirts of the Nepalese capital, killing everyone on board including seven Britons and five Chinese, police said. Photo: AFP

A plane flying 19 people towards Mount Everest went down in flames on the outskirts of the Nepalese capital yesterday, killing everyone on board including seven Britons and five Chinese, police said.
The twin-propeller Sita Air plane had just taken off from Kathmandu and was headed to the town of Lukla, gateway to the world's highest mountain, when it plunged into the banks of a river near the city's airport around daybreak.
Although the exact cause of the crash was still unclear, the manager of Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu said the pilot had reported hitting a bird moments before the crash.
Witnesses described hearing the screams of passengers and seeing flames coming from one of the plane's wings moments before it hit the ground.
"We could hear people inside the aircraft screaming, but we couldn't throw water at the plane to put out the fire because we were scared that the engines were about to explode," Tulasha Pokharel, a 26-year-old housewife who said she one of the first on the scene, told AFP.
Emergency workers lined up the corpses -- which included seven Nepalese along with the Britons and Chinese -- near the smouldering wreckage as they picked through passengers' belongings to identify the dead.
The crash was the sixth fatal air accident in Nepal in the last two years and it raises fresh questions about safety in the impoverished Himalayan country, home to challenging weather, treacherous landing strips and often lax safety standards.
Ninety-five lives have been lost in air accidents in the last two years, according to an AFP tally, with 15 people killed in the latest crash in May when an Agni Air plane carrying Indian pilgrims went down near northern Jomsom airport.
The crash is the second disaster to hit mountaineers in Nepal this week at the start of the autumn climbing season, which is the peak time for visiting Nepal, which has eight of the world's 14 highest mountains.
On Sunday, at least eight people were killed in an avalanche on Mount Mansalu in northwest Nepal. The search for three other missing climbers was abandoned on Thursday.