A small passenger plane belonging to Nepal’s Saurya Airlines crashed and caught fire while taking off from the capital Kathmandu on Wednesday, killing 18 people on board and leaving one survivor, the captain, officials said.
“Only the captain was rescued alive and is receiving treatment at a hospital,” said Tej Bahadur Poudyal, spokesman for Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport.
The 50-seater plane, carrying two crew members and 17 technicians, was heading for regular maintenance to Nepal’s new Pokhara airport, which is equipped with aircraft maintenance hangars, the officials said.
Eighteen of those on board the CRJ-200 aircraft were Nepali citizens, with one engineer from Yemen, Saurya Airlines reported.
“Shortly after takeoff … the aircraft veered off to the right and crashed on the east side of the runway,” the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal said in a statement.
The crash has once again highlighted the poor air safety record of the impoverished, landlocked Himalayan nation that is wedged between India and China and heavily dependent on air connectivity due to its limited road network.
Nearly 360 people have died in plane or helicopter crashes in the country since 2000.
Nepal’s Prime Minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, visited the crash site and asked people to “be patient” in a social media post, without elaborating. An emergency cabinet meeting was called to form a panel to investigate the incident, a government spokesman said.
