Regarding Nepal’s aviation sector, there is a proverb that reads, “Every new tourism minister is greeted by at least one crash.”
This is due to the industry’s pervasive corruption and poor management, as the nation constructs airports costing billions of rupees but is unable to draw aircraft. Increasing safety is still a long way off. International aviation watchdogs have expressed grave concerns on several occasions regarding Nepal’s civil aviation authority’s capacity to supervise safety matters. In the past year and a half, more than 100 people have lost their lives in plane crashes—despite air travel being the world’s safest and most regulated industry in the world.
Wednesday’s crash is the seventh under Pradip Adhikari, the director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal who fits into all political systems, and the fourth fatal one of his tenure. Here are a few examples of how policy corruption has paralysed the Nepali aviation industry, the lifeline of the country’s tourism industry and transport in the mountain region. A few years back, a parliamentary sub-committee headed by Madhav Kumar Nepal had ordered the government to immediately split the civil aviation body due to its dual role of doing business and regulating the sector.
Nepal, the CPN (Unified Socialist) leader, sent Prem Ale to head the tourism ministry a few months later. Ale stopped the bills from being tabled in the lower house for discussion, although the upper house had passed them. Then, Jeevan Ram Shrestha was appointed tourism minister. On his first day, he announced that he would wait to meet the European Commission’s request to separate Nepal’s civil aviation into regulatory and service-providing organisations.
After that, Sudan Kirati was picked as the tourism minister by the Maoist Centre. He took the initiative to register the civil aviation bills in Parliament. Kirati had accused Director General Adhikari of consistently failing to ensure aviation safety, as five aircraft incidents and accidents, including three major disasters, have occurred under Adhikari’s watch. Sources said then-prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal summoned Kirati and Adhikari and ordered them to work “in tandem”. Kirati then stopped talking about the separation.
The issue was then taken up by the parliamentary International Relations and Tourism Committee, which directed Dahal, then prime minister, to table the civil aviation bills in the House of Representatives as soon as possible. The directive was issued in December last year. “The bills have been languishing for a long time. As we doubt the civil aviation ministry will table them in Parliament, we have directed the Prime Minister’s Office to do so,” Raj Kishore Yadav, chairman of the committee, had told the Post.
A few months later, when the Post approached Yadav to inquire about any progress on the bills, Yadav replied that a split “was not necessary”. The budget for this fiscal year, too, makes no mention of the plan to split the aviation body, after including it in the federal government’s document for three consecutive years. In April, lawmaker and member of the International Relations and Tourism Committee Udaya Shumsher Rana told an interaction that he was informed by a former tourism minister that there is an “invisible” hand preventing the passage of two crucial civil aviation bills.
In August 2022, the International Civil Aviation Organisation, the United Nations aviation watchdog, formally asked Nepal to split the civil aviation body and ensure a proper regulatory system. However, the Civil Aviation Authority chose to keep the report secret. A former director general said the tourism industry is bearing the repercussions as planes come down each passing year due to a lax regulatory system. “People are dying due to ‘policy corruption.’” On a sunny Wednesday, nineteen people, including two crew members, were on the Saurya Airlines flight to Pokhara. The 50-seater bombardier CRJ 200 with registration mark 9N-AME was flying 15 technicians to the city, where the jet’s heavy maintenance C-check was planned.
At 11:11 am, the plane took off from the runway’s southern end (Koteshwar). But just a few seconds after the takeoff, people around the airport heard a loud “bang”. “That was an unusual sound. It was a big bang like a bomb [exploding],” said a top official of a private airline, who was a close witness to the crash. Video footage obtained by the Post shows that the jet rolled and climbed around 80-90ft from the ground. It then tilted towards the right and instantly came down. It hit the ground and burst into flames.
The plane then rolled down into a ravine.The cockpit slammed into a cargo container, and it was stuck there, which observers say saved the pilot-in-command, Manish Ratna Shakya, the chief of the operation department at Saurya Airlines. “The pilot survived. He is in stable condition,” said DIG Dan Bahadur Karki, spokesperson for Nepal Police. “It was a miracle.” The fuselage came apart, hit the slope of the tabletop airport, and ricocheted 50 metres away, finally coming to rest on the muddy ground. Eighteen people, including the co-pilot and a foreigner, died. The cockpit and tail were intact.
The 21.4-year-old aircraft was inducted into the Saurya Airlines fleet on March 14, 2017. CCTV footage shows that the nature of the crash was similar to last January’s Yeti Airlines crash in Pokhara. Experts suspect many factors, including an engine failure, a bird strike, and poor maintenance. “The investigation will tell the truth,” said Subash Jha, spokesman for Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport. This is the second biggest crash inside the Kathmandu airport after the US Bangla, a Dhaka-based airline, accident in March 2018 killed 52 of the 71 passengers aboard. Experts observing the crash closely say that, given the nature of the plane’s fall, the right engine might have stopped working and the aircraft eventually lost the “control panel” mode. This narrow panel, located centrally in front of the pilot, can be used to control heading, speed, altitude, vertical speed, vertical navigation, and lateral navigation.
“The aircraft has banked,” said an aircraft engineer. A banked turn (or banking turn) is a turn or change of direction in which the aircraft banks or inclines, usually towards the inside of the turn.“With Nepal’s key festival just over two months away, Saurya, which had a total of three aircraft, was planning a full maintenance of the Bombardier that crashed on Wednesday to remain afloat. The Bombardier CRJ200 had 200 engine hours left for full maintenance,” according to insiders. Full maintenance alone does not necessarily ensure full safety of flights.
Now the airline is left with just one airworthy plane, and authorities are unlikely to allow the company to operate for the same reason. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli paid a rare visit to the crash site on Wednesday. Saurya Airlines had also laid off staff due to financial problems last year. Despite several attempts, the airline officials could not be reached for comments. According to insiders, poor aircraft maintenance could be one of the potential crash factors, as keeping planes airworthy is costly.
Source: Here
