Twin Otter missing in Nepal

[DeathStar-Alpha]

Officials say a small passenger plane with 22 people on board is missing in Nepal while flying in the mountainous region.
Dinesh Shrestha, manager at Kathmandu's Tribhuwan International Airport, says the plane has been out of contact for two hours since taking off from a small airstrip in eastern Nepal.

The Canadian-built Twin Otter aircraft was carrying 19 passengers and 3 crew members.
Mr. Shrestha says two search helicopters are being sent to the location where the missing plane last made radio contact.


Unconfirmed reports of witnesses seeing the plane on fire shortly after take off

[BUSHJEPPY]

DHC6-302 of Tara Air (subsidary of Yeti Airlines) with registration 9N-AFX is the missing aircraft...

[viking767]

The wreckage of a passenger plane carrying 22 people that crashed in Nepal has been found, officials say. The Tara Air Twin Otter plane took off on Wednesday from Lamidanda Airport, 162 km (101 miles) east of Kathmandu and was heading to the capital.
The wreckage was found on a hillside in the Himalayan foothills.
The head of the rescue operation said the aircraft had "smashed into pieces on impact and there are unlikely to be any survivors".
"The plane that went missing on Wednesday has been found crashed into a hillside in eastern Nepal," the chief rescue official, Dimlesh Lal Karna, told AFP news agency.
The plane was found early on Thursday after the search resumed at first light.
The operation had been suspended later on Wednesday due to heavy cloud cover and fading light.
The plane was carrying 19 passengers and three crew. Tara Air said one of the passengers was an American citizen while the rest were believed to be Nepalese citizens, all whom were returning from a pilgrimage to a Hindu temple.
Aviation accidents are not uncommon in mountainous Nepal.
In August, a plane heading for the Everest region crashed in bad weather killing all 14 people on board, including four Americans, a Japanese national and a British national.

[ReverseFlight]

22 dead in Nepal plane crash - CNN.com (http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/12/15/nepal.plane.crash/index.html?hpt=T2)
Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN) -- A DeHavilland DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft that went missing en route from Lamidanda to Kathmandu in eastern Nepal crashed in a mountainous area east of the capital, killing all 22 people aboard, an airport spokesman said Thursday.
"The aircraft seems to have hit a mountainside," Purusottam Shakya, operations supervisor at Tribhuwan International Airport, which serves Kathmandu, told CNN.
The plane disappeared Wednesday, and search and rescue teams looked for it until night fell. A search team in a helicopter found pieces of the aircraft Thursday morning about 150 kilometers east of Kathmandu, said Shakya.
Lamidanda is about 200 kilometers east of Kathmandu.
Shakya said the plane carried 18 passengers -- including one U.S. national -- and three Nepalese crew members. The other 17 passengers were Nepalese.
In August, 14 people were killed when a plane crashed in central Nepal.