Only One, The Black Box Of The Tara Air Plane That Crashed In The Himalayas Has Been Found

Illustration of a De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter Tara Air aircraft in Nepal. (Wikimedia Commons/Solundir)

JAKARTA - Nepal's search and rescue team on Tuesday managed to find the black box of the Tara Air plane that crashed in the Himalayas, as well as finding and evacuating all the dead.

The type of aircraft black box that the search and rescue team managed to find was the flight voice recorder. Thus, all that was left at the crash site was the wreckage of the plane.

Two German nationals, four Indian nationals and 16 Nepalese nationals were on board Tara Air's De Havilland Canada DHC-6-300 Twin Otter, which crashed 15 minutes after takeoff from the tourist city of Pokhara, 125 km (80 miles) west of Kathmandu, on Sunday morning.

The plane was bound for Jomsom, a popular tourist and pilgrimage site, 80 km (50 miles) northwest of Pokhara, on a flight that normally takes only 20 minutes.

A spokesman for the Nepal Civil Aviation Authority (CAAN) said the plane only had a voice recorder to record ground-to-air and air-to-air conversations.

This is slightly different from modern aircraft, where each fleet has two black boxes, namely the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.

"There is nothing but debris left at the crash site now," Deo Chandra Lal Karna told Reuters, as quoted on May 31.

"All bodies and black boxes have been found."

Operated by private airline Tara Air, the plane made its first flight in April 1979, according to flight tracking website Flightradar24.

Reported earlier, Soldiers and rescue workers had retrieved 21 bodies from the rubble, strewn on a steep slope at an altitude of about 14.500 feet, on Monday.

Meanwhile, today, officers found another victim's body, so that a total of 22 victims, consisting of 19 passengers and three crew members, were found.

The bodies of 10 victims were brought to Kathmandu on Monday, and the other 12 bodies will be flown to the capital on Tuesday and released to families after autopsies and identification, said Karna.

The Nepalese government has set up a five-member panel to determine the cause of the crash and suggest preventive measures for the aviation sector.

Nepal itself is home to eight of the world's 14 highest mountains, including Mount Everest, with a history of air accidents. In early 2018, a US-Bangla Airlines flight from Dhaka to Kathmandu crashed on landing and caught fire, killing 51 of the 71 people on board.

In 1992, 167 people aboard a Pakistan International Airlines plane died when it hit a hill while trying to land in Kathmandu.