BANGKOK- Yeti Airlines Flight 691 crashed shortly before landing in the Nepalese resort of Pokhara on Sundaythe gateway to a popular Himalayan trekking area, a 27-minute drive from Kathmandu.
At least 69 of the 72 people on board were confirmed dead.
Pilots say Nepal can be a difficult place to fly, but at the time of the crash the weather was fine, with little wind, clear skies and temperatures well above freezing.
IT CARRIED 72 PEOPLE ON BOARD
So what could have caused the ATR 72 twin-propeller plane to crash?
Dramatic cell phone video captured from the ground shows the final seconds before the plane plummeted a mile from the newly opened Pokhara International Airport.
The plane’s nose lifted noticeably before the left wing suddenly dropped and the plane disappeared from view in the video, indicating a likely stall, said Amit Singh, a veteran pilot and founder of Safety Matters, an Indian foundation.
“If you look at the plane’s trajectory, the nose of the plane goes up, and the nose up would be associated with a reduction in speed,” he told The Associated Press.
“Usually when they have draft, one wing goes down and the wings basically create lift. So when the airflow is reduced, the lift generated is not enough to keep the plane in flight and the wings droop and the plane crashes.”
Professor Ron Bartsch, an aviation safety expert and founder of Australia’s Avlaw Aviation Consulting, told Channel 9 in Sydney he also believed the plane had stalled. Its proximity to the ground may have led pilots to believe its speed was higher than it really was, he added.
To see more from Telemundo, visit https://www.nbc.com/networks/telemundo
“I would like to point out that the plane has stalled,” he said after viewing video taken just before the accident. “Possibly pilot error.”
Yeti Airlines spokesman Pemba Sherpa said the cause of the crash was under investigation.
Introduced in the late 1980s, the ATR-72 was manufactured by a Franco-Italian joint venture, and while it has been involved in several fatal accidents over the years – some due to icing problems – it generally has a “very good track record,” , said Bartsch.
Crews recovered the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder from the crash site on Monday, but only after careful analysis will investigators know for sure what happened.
The plane crash recorded in Nepal this Sunday, when a plane carrying 72 people on board crashed and killed at least 68, is the worst in the region in the past decade.
‘Human factors will be an element that the researchers will look at to determine whether or not there was adequate training,’ Bartsch added. “But planes don’t usually fall out of the sky, especially modern planes.”
Some sort of technical error in the plane’s instruments may have provided the pilots with incorrect data, but even then it’s possible to recover from a stall problem, Singh said.
“Pilots need to be trained to deal with technical failures,” he added.
Singh stressed that despite its “challenging airports and conditions”, Nepal’s aviation sector has a poor record in terms of safety and training. Although it has improved, its planes are banned from flying into European airspace, he stressed.
A pilot who regularly flies an ATR-72-500 plane from India to Nepal said the region’s topography, with its mountain peaks and narrow valleys, increases the risk of accidents and sometimes requires pilots to fly based on their own eyesight instead of instruments .
The plane was losing altitude causing this terrifying moment. To see more from Telemundo, visit https://www.nbc.com/networks/telemundo.
The pilot, who works for a private Indian airline and asked not to be named due to company policy, described the ATR-72-500 as an “unyielding aircraft”, even though the pilot was not very well trained and familiar with the terrain and the Wind unfamiliar is speed of the region.
ATR said on Twitter on Sunday that its specialists are “fully committed to assisting both the investigation and clients” and that its “first thoughts are with everyone affected”.
The company did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.
Home to eight of the 14 highest mountains in the world, Nepal has a history of plane crashes. According to the Safety Matters Foundation, there have been 42 fatal plane crashes in Nepal since 1946.
According to a 2019 safety report by the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, the country’s “hostile topography” and “various weather patterns” were the top challenges, which also led to a “series of accidents” involving small aircraft.
According to the report, these accidents occurred at airports with short runways, and most were due to pilot error.
A popular tourist destination that serves as a gateway to the Annapurna mountain range, Pokhara Airport sits at an elevation of about 2,700 feet.
Before the airport opened two weeks ago, some expressed concern that the significant number of birds in the area – due to the habitat provided by two rivers and a landfill near the airport – could make it even more dangerous.
During the official inauguration of the airfield, the city’s mayor said that work to mitigate the impact of the landfill has been completed, according to local press reports, but it is not clear what specific actions have been taken.
If the plane had been hit by a bird just before landing, it could have caused the pilots to abort their approach and turn back again, which could also have resulted in the engine stalling, Singh said.
“A high thrust setting can cause a stall,” he explained. “The crew tends to mismanage stalls… so again the question is how the pilot handled the problem.”