Nepal plane with 72 on board crashes in Pokhara, at least 68 dead

#WATCH | A passenger aircraft crashed at Pokhara International Airport in Nepal today. 68 passengers and four crew members were onboard at the time of crash. Details awaited. pic.twitter.com/DBDbTtTxNc

— ANI (@ANI) January 15, 2023

Videos and pictures on social media showed  smoke billowing from the crash site and hundreds of rescue workers along the sides of a gorge where the plane went down.

“We don’t know right now if there are survivors,” news agency AFP reported Yeti Airlines spokesperson Sudarshan Bartaula as saying.

Reuters quoted a Nepal airport official as saying there were five Indians, four Russians and one Irish, two South Korean, one Australian, one French and one Argentine national on the ill-fated flight.

Nepal Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal called an emergency Cabinet meeting in the wake of the tragedy. The Prime Minister urged security personnel and the general public to help with the rescue efforts.

The plane was 15 years old, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24.

The ATR72 is a widely used twin-engine turboprop plane manufactured by a joint venture of Airbus and Italy’s Leonardo. Yeti Airlines, the second largest domestic carrier in Nepal, has a fleet of six ATR72-500 planes, according to its website.

The crash is Nepal’s deadliest since 1992, when a Pakistan International Airlines Airbus A300 crashed into a hillside near Kathmandu, killing all 167 people on board.