A small plane carrying 19 people crashed minutes after takeoff from Kathmandu in Nepal on Friday morning. There were no survivors, a police spokesman said.
There were seven British and five Chinese nationals on board the Sita Air twin-engine Dornier 228 aircraft, which was headed for Lukla, the gateway to the Mount Everest region, the spokesman said. The other four passengers and the three-member crew were from Nepal.
The crash site is on the banks of a river about one kilometer from Kathmandu’s international airport.
Sita Airlines spokesperson Ghanashyam Shrestha said the pilots “were trying to making an emergency landing at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan airport after a birdstrike, which then caused a fire,” The Himalayan Times reported.
Others said the plane burst into flames before plunging into the river bank.
The plane took off at about 6:30 a.m. local time. The weather in Kathmandu was clear.
Mountainous Nepal has a poor road network and many residents and foreigners rely on transportation aboard small propeller planes to get to remote regions of the country.
But the rough terrain and high altitudes of many of the airports create an unforgiving environment for flying, especially when the weather is bad and during in-flight emergencies.
In May, 15 people died when a plane operated by Agni Air crashed while trying to land at an airport in Nepal’s northern Annapurna Mountain region, another popular tourist destination.
