Nepal plane crash: Builders' holiday turns into mourning for Trichy

Kathmandu: When eight friends and colleagues from the Tiruchirappalli Centre Builders' Association of India decided to give themselves a well-deserved break in Kathmandu, little did they dream that the date with Mt Everest, the highest peak in the world, and Lord Pashupatinath, would lead to tragedy and mourning.
The eight men as well as an Indian couple working for the UN in Kathmandu were among the 19 people killed in Kathmandu valley on Sunday morning when their mountain flight to view Mt Everest and other Himalayan ranges in the east ended in a crash in the Kotdanda village area in Lalitpur city, about 20 km away from the capital.
Adding to the chaos, Nepal's aviation authorities initially released a wrong set of victims' names, reviving memories of another air crash last year when the victims, mostly Bhutanese pilgrims, were at first declared to be Nepalis.
Finally, the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu released the correct names of the 10 Indian victims, who included a woman.
They are Pankaj Mehta, who worked for the UN in Kathmandu, and his wife Chaya Mehta, and eight builders from Tamil Nadu's Trichy: K Thiyagarajan, RM Meenatchi Sundaram, Kattoov Mahalingam, D Hanasekaran, MV Maruthachalam, AK Krishnan, VM Kankasabesan and M Maniraran.
"They checked into our hotel Saturday evening," said Furpa Sherpa, sales manager at Kathmandu's Grand Hotel. "They had come on a SpiceJet flight from Delhi and were to have left on Oct 27. We put them to a local travel agency, Losar Tours and Travels and they booked a mountain flight for Sunday morning."
The flight took off from Kathmandu around 6.30am and was returning from the Everest region an hour later when it lost contact with the control room. Minutes later, it crashed, killing 18 people. The 19th, 36-year-old Nirajan Karmacharya, was rescued from the wreck by a team of locals and security personnel but died of his injuries while being treated at the B & B Hospital in Lalitpur.
The dead included the three-member Nepali cabin crew of Captain J B Tamrakar, co-pilot Padma Adhikari and airhostess Asmita Shrestha. The others killed were two American tourists, Andrew Wade and Natalie Neilan, Japan's Uejima Toshinori and two Nepalis, Sarda Karmacharya and Jagjan Karmacharya.
25/09/11 Times of India

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Categories: Foreign Sep 2011, Safety Sep 2011