Pesimis Authority Finds Victims OfSElf-Defense Yeti Airlines In Nepal, Searches For One Lost Victim Continued

Fleet ATR-72 Yeti Airlines aircraft. (Wikimedia Commons/TMLN123)

JAKARTA - Nepalese authorities are pessimistic, saying there is no hope of survivors of the felling of Yeti Airlines in Nepal which has been the deadliest crash in 30 years, but the search will continue.

Rescue teams used drones and descended deep canyons on Tuesday, to search for the wreckage of the charred ATR 72 Yeti Airlines turboprop plane, carrying 72 passengers and crew as it crashed near the tourist city of Pokhara on Sunday morning.

"There is no possibility of finding survivors. We have collected 71 bodies so far. The last search will continue," said Tek Bahadur KC, a top district official in Pokhara, Wednesday.

"Identifying the bodies and counting all 72 people is difficult, because of the condition of the bodies," said Ajay KC, a police officer at the rescue site.

"Until the hospital test shows 72 bodies, we will continue to look for the last person," said Ajay KC.

It is known that the search team found 68 bodies shortly after the accident, and two more were found on Monday. Yesterday, another body was found in the afternoon, officials said.

"For the purpose of searching for corpses, the team in the field has diverted the nearby river flow," explained Gurudutt Ghimire, another official involved in the search operation.

"There's nothing left there. But the search will continue," said Ghimire.

On Monday, the SAR team managed to find the two black boxes of the plane that crashed, namely the cockpit sound recorder (CDR) and flight data recorder (FDR). Both are in good condition, a discovery that may help investigators determine the cause of the crash.

Since Nepal does not have the facility to read black box data, the device will be sent to the country recommended by the aircraft manufacturer.

As previously reported, the Yeti Airlines plane carrying 72 crew members and passengers crashed in Pokhara in Nepal, the worst air accident in three decades in the small Himalayan country.

Citing the Aviation 24, the Yeti Airlines fleet that crashed was an ATR 72-500 aircraft with registration number 9N-ANC with flight number YT601 between Kathmandu and Pokhara.

The plane flew from the capital Kathmandu to Pokhara, the country's second most populous city and a gateway to the Himalayan, state media reported The Rising Nepal. Pokhara is located about 129 kilometers west of Kathmandu.