Unsafe skies

Another deadly air crash in Nepal has once more made headlines around the world, further corroding the country’s poor aviation safety track record, and prompting questions about why these tragedies keep happening.

A Saurya Airlines Bombardier CRJ200 on a maintenance ferry flight to Pokhara crashed on takeoff at Kathmandu airport shortly before noon on 24 July, killing 18 of the 19 people on board. 

The tragedy raised immediate questions about why a plane on a routine C Check ferry flight was carrying staff, including some with families. 

Initial reports, including videos of the crash show the plane bank steeply to the right after takeoff from runway 02, descend rapidly and just starting to level off before impact on an open space east of the runway. 

The captain Manish Shakya appears to have survived because the plane broke in two throwing the front of the plane away from the main cabin which exploded in a fireball. The actual reason why the plane spun out of control immediately after takeoff will only be known once Capt Shakya gives his account, and after an investigation.

Aviation experts say that despite the horrendous loss of life, Wednesday’s crash could have been much worse had the plane veered to the left instead, and hit the international terminal building or the apron which was full of big jets preparing for departure. 

It was also fortuitous that the plane fell within the airport perimeter in an area where the ground is being levelled for a new international terminal building, and not in the densely populated suburb of Thapagaun east of the runway.

The Canadian-built Bombardier CRJ200 of Saurya Airlines with call sign 9N-AME was 21 years old, and the only one flying in the domestic carrier’s fleet. The carrier mainly served trunk routes to Biratnagar and Bhadrapur in eastern Nepal. Among the dead in Wednesday’s crash were most of Saurya’s senior management, and its technical crew, including a Yemeni national.

The CRJ200 has a proven safety record with over 1,000 of various varients built, and the model was purchased by Mitsubishi in 2000.

The Saurya Air crash is an outlier in Nepal’s air crash history where most disasters have been blamed on CFIT (Controlled flight Into Terrain, in which a plane hits a mountain hidden in cloud) or pilot error. Nepal’s high terrain, extreme weather and basic navigation facilities make it a challenging place to fly.

An analysis by Nepali Times of 74 fatal crashes in Nepal in the past 60 years with data from various sources shows that a total of 960 have been killed. Some domestic carriers have lost most of their fleet of aircraft.

The crash was similar to a Bangladesh airliner that crashed near the runway at Kathmandu airport in 2018, killing 49 and injuring 22. An investigation concluded that the captain of the US Bangla Bombardier Q400 was having an emotional breakdown. 

A Sita Air Dornier 225 flight to Lukla also crashed soon after takeoff from Kathmandu in 2013, killing 23 mainly foreign trekkers. A probe into that crash showed that one of the causes was that the plane was overloaded.

The deadliest international crashes involved Thai and PIA Airbuses on approach to Kathmandu airport within two months of each other in 1992, killing a total of 280 people.

Records show that 201 people have been killed in crashes in Nepal since 2016, 79 of them in three crashes in just the past two years, the most serious being the Yeti Airlines disaster on 15 January 2022 at Pokhara airport which had been inaugurated just two weeks previously.

The Saurya jet was flying to Pokhara for routine check after leasing the hangar there. Saurya used to maintain its aircraft at Buddha Air’s facilities in Kathmandu, but its hangar was not free.

The last fatal accident in Nepal was a Manang Air helicopter that went down near Lukla last year which killed six.

Nepal’s domestic air travel has seen a boom in the past two years because of the poor state of highways. Most roads have been blocked by landslides and floods during the current monsoon, and there have been a spate of bad highway crashes including a debris flow that swept two intercity buses into the swollen Trisuli River on the Mugling highway on the night of 12 July carrying 65 passengers. The buses have not yet been found.