Tara Air Flight 197 Crashes in the Nepalese Himalayas (2022)
On the morning of May 29, 2022, a small Twin Otter aircraft operated by Tara Air vanished from radar just twelve minutes after leaving Pokhara Airport for the mountain town of Jomsom. All 22 people aboard—passengers and crew—died when the plane slammed into a remote Himalayan slope in Mustang District, marking the second fatal disaster on this same short but notoriously dangerous route in six years.
A Routine Flight into the Mountains
Flight 197 was a scheduled domestic service flown by Tara Air, the regional subsidiary of Yeti Airlines, connecting Pokhara Airport with the small mountain airstrip at Jomsom, gateway to the Annapurna and Mustang region. The route, though only about 20 minutes long, is one of the most demanding in commercial aviation, threading through steep Himalayan valleys where pilots must navigate largely by sight rather than instruments. The aircraft, a De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter well suited to short, rugged airstrips, departed Pokhara at 09:55 Nepal Standard Time carrying 22 people. Onboard were reportedly 19 passengers, including a mix of Nepali citizens and foreign tourists from India and Germany, along with a crew of three. Such flights are a lifeline for the isolated Mustang District, where road access is limited and air travel remains the fastest way to reach remote settlements. Air traffic controllers maintained routine contact with the flight after takeoff, tracking its progress as it climbed toward the mountainous terrain surrounding the Kali Gandaki gorge. At 10:07 NPT, roughly twelve minutes into the flight, controllers lost all contact with the aircraft. No distress call was received, and the plane simply disappeared from communication and radar coverage in an area where mountains rise steeply on either side of the narrow flight corridor.
Did You Know?
The Pokhara–Jomsom route flown by Flight 197 had already claimed 23 lives in a nearly identical Tara Air crash back in February 2016, making it the second fatal disaster for the same airline on the same corridor in just six years.
A Difficult Search in Treacherous Terrain
The disappearance triggered an immediate search-and-rescue operation, but poor weather and the extreme terrain of Mustang District hampered efforts for hours. Low clouds, rain, and the steep, high-altitude landscape made both helicopter searches and satellite tracking difficult in the critical first day. Nepali Army helicopters, along with private rescue teams and local volunteers, combed the mountainsides near the flight's presumed path, an area where wreckage from a previous Tara Air disaster had also been found years earlier. Nearly 20 hours after the plane vanished, searchers finally located the wreckage scattered across a remote mountainside in the Thasang rural municipality, at an altitude reportedly exceeding 14,000 feet. The debris field, spread across the rugged slope, offered grim confirmation of the crash and little hope that anyone had survived the impact. Rescue teams, including army personnel airlifted to the site, faced significant logistical challenges recovering both wreckage and remains given the altitude, weather, and inaccessibility of the crash location. Over the following days, all 22 bodies were recovered from the mountainside and transported to Pokhara for identification, a painstaking process given the severity of the crash and the remoteness of the site. The recovery operation underscored the immense difficulty of responding to aviation accidents in Nepal's high mountain regions, where even reaching a crash site can take the better part of a day.
A Grim Pattern of Himalayan Air Disasters
The crash of Flight 197 was not an isolated tragedy for Tara Air on this particular route. In February 2016, Tara Air Flight 193 crashed on the same Pokhara–Jomsom corridor, killing all 23 people aboard, making the 2022 disaster the second fatal accident on this exact route within six years. Nepal's aviation sector has long grappled with a troubling safety record, driven by a combination of extreme mountain terrain, rapidly shifting weather patterns, aging aircraft fleets, and limited radar coverage in remote valleys. The European Union has banned Nepali carriers from its airspace over safety concerns, and international aviation bodies have repeatedly flagged the country's air safety oversight as an area needing improvement. Small Twin Otter aircraft like the one involved in Flight 197 are essential for connecting isolated Himalayan communities that have no road access, but they operate in conditions that leave little margin for pilot error or sudden weather changes. Following the crash, Nepali authorities launched an investigation into the cause, with early scrutiny focused on weather conditions and the challenges of visual flight rules navigation through the narrow Kali Gandaki gorge. The disaster reignited public debate in Nepal about the need for modernized navigation infrastructure and stricter oversight of domestic carriers serving the country's most remote and mountainous regions.