Kathmandu: The fate of four members of an Odia family and 18 others on board a small plane of a Nepalese airline remained unclear after the aircraft crashed Sunday in the mountainous region of the Himalayan nation minutes after taking off from the tourist city of Pokhara, officials said. The airline issued the list of passengers which identified four Indians as Ashok Kumar Tripathi, his wife Vaibhavi Bandekar (Tripathi) and their children Dhanush and Ritika.
All of them belong to a family from Odisha and had gone to Nepal on a vacation. While Ashok was living in Bhubaneswar, his wife and children were staying in Thane city near Mumbai.
The Twin Otter 9N-AET plane belonging to Tara Air took off at 10.15am from Pokhara, and lost contact with the control tower 15 minutes later, according to an airline spokesperson. Nepali Army Major General Baburam Shrestha in the evening said that the plane was spotted in a burning state at Laningchgola, an upper area of Larikota in Thasang Rural Municipality-2 in Mustang district, The Rising Nepal newspaper reported.
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The status of the crew and passengers were immediately not known. There are four Indian nationals, two Germans and 13 Nepali passengers besides a three member Nepali crew, said Sudarshan Bartaula, a spokesperson at the airlines.
Tara Air flight 9NAET that took off from Pokhara at 9.55am today with 22 people onboard, including 4 Indians, has gone missing. Search and rescue operation is on. The embassy is in touch with their family. Our emergency hotline number +977-9851107021, the Indian embassy in Nepal tweeted.