Tara Air of Nepal lost a Twin Otter with 22 people aboard on Saturday, May 29, 2022, while making a routine flight from Pokhara to Jomsom that takes about 25 minutes.
There’s not much that can go wrong except weather, navigation, pilot error, mechanical failure, vicious downdrafts and windshears, a terrorist bomb, something else I haven’t thought of, or a landing on an airstrip that scares the crap out of any normal human being (watch video here), although there’s an even scarier one at Lukla in the Everest region (watch that video here).
It didn’t make it to the Jomsom airstrip, though, so we can eliminate that last one. As you can see in the video below, there are lots of things to smack into on the way.
Wreckage was located Sunday, where it appears the plane may have tried landing on a cliff (see photo here). A story here suggests the planet “diverted” from its normal flight path, if there is one, to go sightseeing in the vicinity of Dhaulagiri, the world’s 7th highest mountain, which isn’t a good place to land either (see photo here).
Frankly, I’d much rather enjoy the view from my computer chair on YouTube than from a seat on one of those planes. Nice view of Machapuchare at 1:25 in the video below.