Black box of crashed Yeti Airlines aircraft recovered from accident site in Pokhara

KATHMANDU: The black box of the crashed Yeti Airlines aircraft was recovered from the accident site on Monday, officials said, as rescue operations intensified to locate the four missing people.

On Sunday, a Yeti Airlines plane with 72 people onboard, including five Indians, crashed into a river gorge while landing at the newly-opened airport in the resort city of Pokhara, killing at least 68 people.

This was Nepal's deadliest aviation accident in over 30 years.

The black box of the crashed aircraft was found at the accident site and it was handed over to the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, said Yeti Airlines spokesperson Sudarshan Bartaula.

The cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder were recovered on Monday, as search and rescue teams rappelled down a 300-metre gorge to continue their efforts to locate the four missing persons.

Since the accident site lies in a deep gorge of the Seti River, rescuers were finding it difficult to make much progress in search operations, Nepal Army sources said.

Meanwhile, a medical team was airlifted from the Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu for conducting postmortem of the victims at the Western Regional Hospital in Pokhara, media reports said.