Search-and-rescue officials in Nepal have located the crash site of a plane carrying 22 people that went missing on Sunday (May 29).
An army spokesman posted a photo of the crash site on Twitter. It showed the shattered plane on a mountainside strewn with debris, including what appeared to be a wing of the plane displaying the Tara Air flight number 9NAET in green lettering.
The spokesman, Brig. Gen. Narayan Silwal, said in a tweet that the plane crashed in the Mustang district, near its destination Jomsom..
A local police inspector and a guide have already reached the site, Silwal said. Other rescue team members from different agencies were on their way.

The Indian Embassy in Kathmandu says the aircraft, a DHC-6-300 Twin Otter operated by the private airline Tara Air, went missing shortly after taking off from Pokhara, in central Nepal, at 9:55 a.m. on Sunday, .
Jomsom, the plane’s destination, is near Nepal’s border with Tibet. The flight time was supposed to be 20 minutes.
Tara Air told Reuters that the plane was carrying four Indian nationals, two Germans and 16 Nepalis, of whom three were crew members.

The turboprop Twin Otter 9N-AET plane operated by Tara Air had lost contact minutes after it took off from the tourist city of Pokhara around 10 am on Sunday.
The Canadian-built plane was flying from the city of Pokhara to Jomsom, a popular tourist town in central Nepal.
“The aircraft was seen over the sky of Jomsom in Mustang and then had diverted to Mt. Dhaulagiri after which it hadn’t come into contact,” Chief District Officer Netra Prasad Sharma confirmed to ANI over the phone.

The airline issued the list of passengers which identified four Indians as Ashok Kumar Tripathy, his wife Vaibhavi Bandekar (Tripathy) and their children Dhanush and Ritika. The family was based in Thane city near Mumbai.
The elder sister of Vaibhavi Tripathi has requested officials not to inform her mother as her health condition is “critical”, an official said.
According to Flightradar24, a website that tracks flights in real time around the world, the Tara Air flight stopped transmitting a signal around Shikha, a mountainous area north of Pokhara. The aircraft lost contact with the control tower shortly after it took off on its short journey from Pokhara, the Associated Press reported.

The Washington Post adds that twenty-three people died in 2016 when a Twin Otter aircraft operated by Tara Air and flying the same Pokhara-to-Jomsom route crashed and was later found near a village about 30 miles south of Jomsom. At least 49 dead in Nepal after plane crashed on landing, officials say.
The International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency, audited Nepal’s civil aviation industry in 2017 and found that the country scored below the global average in investigating accidents.

Nepali airlines are banned from flying in the airspace of the European Union because of “a lack of safety oversight by the aviation authorities” there.

WITH INPUTS FROM VARIOUS NEWS SOURCES

  International Civil Aviation Organisation, Nepal, Tara Air