There’s news today of a plane crash in Nepal that has killed 19 people. The plane was carrying tourists on a tour around the peaks of the region, including Mount Everest and is said to have gone down in foggy weather after losing contact with the control tower at around 07:31 local time (02:46 BST).

The privately-operated Buddha Air plane was a Beechcraft 1900D manufactured by Raytheon Aircraft (now Hawker Beechcraft) and the crash killed all 19 on board, 16 of them tourists. One person was found still alive but has died of his injuries since. Ganeshraj Joshi, Nepal’s Tourism Secretary, said that those on board consisted of six Nepalis (3 of them crew), 10 Indians, 1 Japanese and 2 Americans.

The plane crashed in Godavari, several kilometres from the capital Kathmandu, according to BBC News. At present the crash is still being investigated and no cause has yet been revealed. However local TV has reported that onlookers saw flames from the plane just before it went down and that the weather conditions were foggy. There were also reports that the plane impacted the roof of a house in Bisankunarayan village.

A police spokesman, Binod Singh, informed Reuters that the bodies had been recovered by ground but that helicopters have been prevented from landing in the area because of the bad weather. He said, “Once the helicopters land, we’ll bring all bodies to Kathmandu and take them to the Teaching Hospital for post-mortem.”

An Associated Press report on AJC.com tells how the two Americans on board have been identified as Andrew Wade and Natalie Neilan and that the Japanese citizen killed was named as Toshinori Uejima but that no further information on these victims has been released.

Sadly this type of incident is not unusual in the mountainous region. Two other plane crashes in August and then December last year killed a total of 36 people. If you have any thoughts about this plane crash then please leave a comment below.

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