KATMANDU, Nepal — Fourteen people, including four Americans, died Tuesday in Nepal when their plane crashed in inclement weather, after a failed attempt to reach a popular destination for touring hikers near Mount Everest, according to Nepali officials.
The three-member flight crew also died in the crash, as did five Nepali passengers, a British passenger and a passenger from Japan.
The Agni Air flight crashed about 50 miles south of the capital, Katmandu, said Laxman Bhattarai, a spokesman for Nepal’s Ministry of Civil Aviation and Tourism. The plane, a German-made Dornier turboprop, was returning to Katmandu after bad weather had prevented it from reaching the Lukla airport in the Everest region.
On Tuesday afternoon, Nepal’s government announced an investigation into the cause of the crash. One witness told a Nepalese television station that there appeared to be an explosion in midair before the aircraft went down.
The flight manifest suggested the passengers were traveling with a tour group.
Terry White, a spokesman at the United States Embassy in Nepal, said the families of the four Americans had been notified. Nepalese aviation officials identified them as Irina Shekhets, whose 30th birthday was Tuesday; Leuzi Cardoso, 49; Heather Finch, 40; and Kendra Dominique Fallon, 18.
Ms. Cardoso and Ms. Finch, who worked together at a law firm in Provo, Utah, had been traveling with a tour group to Lukla, their jumping-off point for a trek to the Everest base camp, said John Valentine, managing partner at the firm.
“It had been a lifelong dream,” Mr. Valentine said. “They had been training for it and training for it. They’d gone to our highest peaks in Utah to get acclimatized to the elevation.”
Weather has often been blamed for plane crashes in the same region. On Tuesday, visibility at the crash site was minimal.
coppied by http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/world/asia/25nepal.html
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