Angie Gaunt woke up on a Friday last September to hear the radio announce an air crash in Kathmandu.
The report said that Britons were among those killed shortly after a Sita Air flight took off, en route to the Everest region. Gaunt’s husband, Timothy Oakes, was in Nepal realising his long-held dream of trekking to base camp.
‘I jumped out of bed screaming. Only a few hours earlier I’d read he was flying out to Lukla to start the trek,’ she says. She called her friend Maggie Holding, whose husband Steve was travelling with Oakes. Days earlier, the four had enjoyed a meal before the men set off for Heathrow.
Calls to the Foreign Office confirmed that both men’s names were on the flight manifest. The FCO rang Holding to confirm Steve’s death as she watched footage of the burning wreckage on TV.
All of the 19 people on board, seven of whom were British, died. It was Nepal’s sixth fatal air crash – three of them Everest-bound – in two years, a period that claimed the lives of 95 people.
The lure of the Himalayas attracts more than 100,000 trekkers, including 40,000 Brits, each year to Nepal. Visitor numbers to Everest have doubled since the end of the civil war there in 2006.
Some 35,000 walk each year to Everest’s base camp, the vast majority starting from Lukla’s Tenzing-Hillary Airport.
Climbing the peak is also more popular than ever. Last spring was so busy there were queues on the upper slopes.
This spring is the 60th anniversary of the first ascent by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.
Trekkers and climbers are already flocking to Nepal to join in the celebrations. Thousands more will take Everest flights to view the peak from the air.
Now Angie Gaunt, Maggie Holding and other relatives of those killed in the Sita Air accident want to know what has been done to improve aviation safety.
Pilots and experts in Nepal fear more accidents will happen in a country where political failure and poor regulation are undermining its vital tourist industry.
Sixty years ago, when the British expedition left Kathmandu’s lush valley to climb Everest, they walked the whole way to base camp in around three weeks.
In 1953, with few cars and very few roads, there was no choice. The first planes only landed in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, in 1949. Now the city’s polluted streets are clogged with traffic.
A construction boom has gobbled up farmland to house a growing population swollen by those escaping poverty and the ten-year civil war that brought an end to the Nepalese monarchy.
Manju Pokhrel migrated to the city a decade ago, and built a shack on the banks of the polluted Manohara river, close to Kathmandu’s airport. She was one of the few up and about that September morning.
Flights into the Everest region start early to make the most of calm flying conditions. More than 60 flights a day land at Tenzing-Hillary Airport at the height of the season.
The Pokhrels and their neighbours barely notice them. But Manju heard an engine note that was unfamiliar.
‘It was going put-put-put-put,’ she says.
From the cowshed, her husband Badri saw an aircraft turning unusually low over the rooftops towards the slum. Manju watched it clear the corrugated roofs and plough nose-first into a bare patch of sand 150ft from where she sat.
What was so unusual with this latest Everest crash was that it happened close to Kathmandu and not nearer to Lukla, often cited as the most challenging airstrip in the world. Built in the early Sixties, Lukla airport is now an essential part of Everest tourism, carved into a hillside above the Dudh Kosi river at 9,200ft.
The old dirt strip was tarmacked in 1999, but landing at Lukla is still a challenge. Just 1,500ft long and only 60ft wide, the runway ends in a blank mountain wall and has an uphill gradient of 12 per cent.
Only STOL (short take-off and landing) aircraft, like the Dornier 228 or Twin Otter, are able to land in such a short distance. Overshoot and you crash into the hillside at its end. Undershoot and you plough into the steep hillside beneath.
Both have happened. The approach can only be attempted in good weather and there are still no navigational aids.
And because the bottom of the runway is lower than the top, pilots suffer spatial disorientation, with their aircraft lower than they think.
‘What you’re seeing is an illusion,’ says Nepal Airlines pilot Vijay Lama.
‘It’s scintillating. I never do a landing with tourists without them applauding.’
During the tourist season, in the spring and autumn, airlines in Nepal focus on lucrative flights to Everest. Foreign visitors to the country pay a hefty premium to subsidise seats for Nepalese passengers.
The half-hour flight from Kathmandu to Lukla costs a foreigner $127. Seventy per cent of Nepal’s domestic air freight also passes through Lukla to service the Everest trekking industry.
With only four parking bays at the tiny strip, at peak times pilots have just five minutes to turn around and head back to Kathmandu.
Incidents – minor accidents where the aircraft bumps into something – are not uncommon but often go unreported.
And with so little time on the ground, pilots can’t check on what’s being put on board. With Nepal’s laissez-faire attitude to regulation, aircraft routinely leave Lukla overloaded.
Ang Chhu, a sherpa who has worked on dozens of expeditions and climbed Everest three times, says everyone knows how to get extra weight onto a flight.
‘You give the baggage loader 1,000 rupees (£7.50) and they’ll get it on. Either they’ll overload the aircraft or they’ll take someone else’s stuff off. The tourist only finds out when they’ve landed at Kathmandu.’
‘I can almost guarantee you that all the flights in and out of Lukla are overloaded,’ says Lama.
‘Taking off from Kathmandu, you can feel if the aircraft’s too heavy. I’m very strict about it. I’ll go back. But can you do that if you are flying for a private airline?’
Nepal’s private airlines are doing their utmost to cash in on the country’s booming tourism sector.
Bad weather frequently closes Tenzing-Hillary Airport during the season and tourists become desperate to fly out to connect with flights home. In 2011, cloud obscured Lukla for a week, and 4,000 tourists and sherpas crowded into the village.
Food prices soared and tempers frayed. It’s in conditions like this that air traffic controllers come under pressure and bribes swap hands to move tourists up the waiting list.
Local politicians, airlines, police, even tourists can get access to control towers and lean on controllers to permit flights. ‘Controllers have to be isolated from the public at remote air strips,’ Lama warns. ‘Nobody should be able to go in the tower.’
Lama is an outspoken critic of how aviation is regulated and managed in Nepal.
‘The biggest question is why so many accidents have occurred in our country. We play this game of throwing the ball into someone else’s court all the time. We have to accept our mistakes.’
Four months on from the Sita Air disaster, I’m standing at the spot where the aircraft came down, looking for answers. A gaggle of boys and girls are playing football nearby. Scraps of half-burned trekking gear still lie in the dirt – the top of a ski pole, half a walking boot – along with what looks like a piece of the aircraft itself.
Soaring in the sky on the flight path to the airport are black kites that feed on the rubbish dumped in the filthy water. The pilot of the doomed plane, Captain Bijay Tandukar, reported hitting one of these birds, severely damaging the right engine during take-off.
Experts in Nepal believe fragments from the engine may have damaged the tail fin, taking the aircraft either completely or partially out of his control.
Local people on the ground believe Tandukar steered his stricken plane away from the camp; some pilots agree. Until the official accident report is released no one can be sure.
It took 15 minutes for police to arrive and start moving hundreds of onlookers away from the burning wreckage.
Almost half an hour after the crash, the first fire engine appeared but on the wrong side of the river, which was swollen with late-summer rain.
When the fire was out, police turned the tail fin on its side, disrupting the site before investigators could arrive. Then the aviation authorities did what they usually do following a crash in Nepal – they blamed the pilot.
On the morning of the crash, at her home in Kathmandu, the pilot’s wife Julie Tandukar got a call from one of her husband’s pilot friends.
He told her there had been an accident and to turn on the television. Like Maggie Holding, she saw her husband’s aircraft on the screen in flames.
Tandukar had been a pilot for 15 years. At the time of his death, he was planning to study in America to become Sita Air’s pilot instructor.
Yet even while the wreckage was still smouldering, an official at the aviation ministry, Suresh Acharya, told the media that following the bird strike the pilot had been ‘panic-stricken’, and had tried to turn too quickly to regain the runway. This was the story that went round the world, but his comments angered Tandukar’s family.
‘On what basis did he say this?’ says Julie Tandukar. ‘If he’d said this privately to colleagues, that would have been fine, but not to the media. We have to wait for the accident report. He doesn’t know what happened.’
Shortly after his press briefing, Acharya was appointed to the crash investigation team.
Julie Tandukar says she hasn’t been able to tell her five-year-old son that his father is dead.
‘We told him his father’s in America buying him a plane. You know, a lot of people by the river think my husband is like a god for taking the aircraft away from their homes.’
Pilots are still seen as glamorous in Nepal, but thanks to decades of political interference and corruption the national airline has turned from being a source of pride into a national joke. It now has fewer than half a dozen aircraft in service.
Leaner private operators have taken up the slack but insiders say it’s too easy to start a domestic airline in Nepal. The list of failed airlines easily outstrips those still in business. When one goes bust, like Agni Air did recently after two fatal crashes, remaining aircraft are sold on to a new operator.
Pilots say they are under too much pressure from their bosses during busy periods and that the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) isn’t capable of addressing the problems undermining safety. They worry that heavy traffic in the Everest region could lead to a mid-air collision.
‘CAAN cannot close its eyes any more,’ says Lama. ‘There have been too many crashes. It’s the same in lots of developing countries.
'We bring in a system but we don’t make people stick to it. The regulatory body hasn’t been able to keep up with the growth in aviation. We have the same aircraft, but twice the traffic.’
Nagendra Prasad Ghimire is the chair of the investigation board for the Sita Air crash and worked at the civil aviation ministry for 36 years.
He knows his team is under close scrutiny. Investigators from the UK’s Air Accident Investigation Board have also flown to Nepal to form their own judgments.
He acknowledges police compromised the crash site but claims the tail section was moved as part of the ‘rescue operation’. Ghimire admits there is some ‘hanky-panky’ with overloading aircraft but that regulations are enforced.
He says development loans could bring new navigation aids to Lukla and that traffic growth is under control.
‘We (have) instituted a traffic flow system. Lukla needs to know how much traffic it’s getting. So far so good.’
Doubts about regulation and lack of investment in Nepalese civil aviation could have dire consequences for Everest tourism as relatives seek legal redress and foreign governments try to protect their nationals.
In Nepal, compensation for families of air-crash victims is limited to $20,000 (£13,400), an anachronism in modern civil aviation.
‘Commercial operators with low levels of liability don’t make flying safer,’ says James Healy-Pratt, head of aviation at law firm Stewarts Law.
In the UK, he adds, there’s no such restriction, and tour operators might find themselves liable under European law.
Hampshire-based Explore Worldwide, the company that organised the trek for all the British victims, has already joined with other operators to send an independent aviation auditor to Nepal, according to managing director Ashley Toft.
The European Aviation Safety Agency has written to CAAN asking what is being done about improving safety. Some experts believe that one or more of Nepal’s domestic airlines will soon be placed on the EU’s blacklist.
Local people are planning a prayer ceremony for the first anniversary of the Sita Air crash. Angie Gaunt and Maggie Holding say they are grateful to the Foreign Office and praise the charity Disaster Action. But they are still waiting for answers. ‘I would never have said to Steve, “Don’t go, it’s too dangerous,”’ says Maggie Holding.
‘These things always happen to other people, don’t they? It should have been the best experience ever in the mountains and I would very much wish for others to have that experience – but safely.’
Sunday 24 March 2013
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2296381/Everest-danger-Why-planes-taking-tourists-Nepal-climb-mountain-crashing.html
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