Lucknow, Jan 16 : A deadly plane crash in Nepal left at least 69 people dead on Sunday. The ATR-72 aircraft, operated by Yeti Airlines, was flying from Kathmandu to Pokhara. The Nepalese passenger plane had 72 people on board, including five Indians. It crashed into a river gorge while landing at the newly-opened airport in central Nepal’s resort city of Pokhara, as per a PTI report. Now, a video has surfaced wherein an Indian passenger apparently livestreamed the final moments before the crash.
The clip is said to have been recorded by Sonu Jaiswal, one of the four passengers who were travelling from Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur. Jaiswal is among the dead; he had been doing a Facebook live in the final moments before the crash and the same video appears on his unverified account on the social media platform, reported media. Abhishek Pratap Shah, a former MP of Nepal and Central committee member of the Nepali Congress, told media that he had received the video from a friend and that it had been recovered from the wreckage after the crash.
The clip shows the passenger calmly smiling and recording a view of the city glimpsed from the window. Other passengers are also seen during the course of the video. The scene soon changes as the recording goes haywire, with an immense fire seen through the window and cries are heard from distraught passengers before the screen goes black.
The video was heart-wrenching for many viewers. “First time I have seen something like this, the horror of the last few seconds of so many people . This is so tragic and painful,” reads one tweet. “This is gut-wrenching… Were the passengers aware of the crash, anyone? Unbelievable though!” reads another. “He looked so calm, nobody would ever imagine what happened next! Om shanti,” one Twitter user wrote.
Mishandling, malfunctioning of aircraft system or pilot fatigue could be among the factors that caused the crash, according to pilots and an aircraft accident investigation expert, as per a media report. Yeti Airlines’ 9N-ANC ATR-72 aircraft took off from Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport at 10:33 am, according to the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN).
The crash was Nepal’s deadliest since 1992 when a Pakistan International Airlines Airbus A300 crashed into a hillside upon approach to Kathmandu, killing all 167 people on board, media reported.
