Nepali search and rescue personnel retrieved the corpse of the last of 22 persons onboard a tiny plane that crashed two days ago in the Himalayas, as well as the flight’s voice recorder, on Tuesday.
The De Havilland Canada DHC-6-300 Twin Otter plane crashed 15 minutes after taking off from Pokhara, 125 kilometers (80 miles) west of Kathmandu, on Sunday morning, killing two Germans, four Indians, and 16 Nepalis.
On what should have been a 20-minute trip, the jet was headed towards Jomsom, a major tourist and religious site 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Pokhara.
According to a representative for Nepal’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAAN), the plane only carried a voice recorder to preserve ground-to-air and air-to-air communications. A flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder are two such “black boxes” found on modern planes.
“Nothing is left at the collision scene now but the debris,” Deo Chandra Lal Karna told media. “All of the bodies, as well as the black box, have been found.”
According to flight-tracking service Flightradar24, the aircraft was first flown in April 1979 by privately owned Tara Air.
On Monday, soldiers and rescue personnel recovered 21 dead from the wreckage, which was scattered across a steep slope at an elevation of roughly 14,500 feet.
The remains of ten fatalities were flown into Kathmandu on Monday, and the bodies of the other 12 victims will be flown in on Tuesday and released to their families after an autopsy and identification, according to Karna.
The Nepali government has formed a five-member commission to investigate the cause of the incident and recommend aviation safety measures.
A US-Bangla Airlines aircraft from Dhaka to Kathmandu crashed and caught fire in early 2018, killing 51 of the 71 passengers on board.
When a Pakistan International Airlines jet crashed into a hill while attempting to land in Kathmandu in 1992, all 167 persons on board were murdered.
