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The newly opened airport in Nepal where a Yeti Airlines plane was trying to land when it crashed over the weekend, killing all 72 on board, does not have an instrument landing system that can guide the plane to the runway, officials said Thursday.
Aviation safety experts say it reflects the Himalayan nation’s poor air safety record, although the cause of the crash has yet to be determined.
Jagannath Niroula, a spokesperson for the Nepal Civil Aviation Authority, said that Pokhara International Airport’s instrument landing system will not be operational until February 26. The airport began operations on January 1.
The instrument landing system helps the aircraft to fly safely when the pilot cannot maintain visual contact with the surrounding obstacles and ground, especially due to weather conditions or at night. Pilots can also fly by sight instead of relying on instruments.
Pilots said mountainous Nepal, where visibility is a common aviation problem, can be a difficult place to fly, but conditions at the time of the crash were good, with moderate winds, clear skies and temperatures above freezing.
While it’s still unclear what caused the crash, several aviation experts say video taken from the ground in the plane’s final moments shows it went into a stall, though it’s unclear why.
Air security ‘inadequate’: analysts
Amit Singh, an experienced pilot and founder of the Safety Matters India Foundation, said the lack of an instrument landing system or navigational tools could be a “contributing cause” of the crash and showed Nepal’s “very strong air safety culture.”
“Flying in Nepal is challenging when you don’t have navigation tools and it puts extra workload on pilots when they encounter problems during flight,” Singh said. “The lack of an instrument landing system only confirms that Nepal’s air safety culture is inadequate.”
Yeti Airlines said the plane’s cockpit voice recorder will be analyzed locally, but the flight data recorder will be sent to France. Both were taken there.
The twin-engine ATR 72-500 was flying from the capital, Kathmandu, to Pokhara, 200 kilometers to the west, when it fell into a ravine on approach to the airport. The crash site is about 1.6 kilometers from the runway at an elevation of about 820 meters.
The crash was the deadliest in Nepal since 1992, when a Pakistan International Airlines plane plowed into a hill while trying to land in Kathmandu, killing all 167 people on board. There have been 42 fatal plane crashes in Nepal since 1946, according to the Safety Matters Foundation.
A 2019 safety report from the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal said that “hostile topography” and “different weather patterns” are the biggest dangers to flights in the country.
The EU demands reform
The European Union has banned airlines from Nepal from flying to the 27-nation bloc since 2013, citing lax safety standards. In 2017, the International Civil Aviation Organization cited improvements in Nepal’s aviation sector, but the EU continued to demand administrative reforms.
Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda met the families of the sick on Thursday and asked the hospital authorities to speed up the postmortem of some of the victims so that the bodies can be handed over to their families.
Authorities say it will take time to identify some of the badly burned bodies.
The plane’s engine was made by Pratt & Whitney Canada. As a result, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB) said it would join the investigation.
Global Affairs Canada previously told CBC News it was not aware of any Canadians on the plane, after consulting with local authorities.
Apart from the people from Nepal, the victims have been identified as being from Australia, England, India, South Korea and the United States.
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