Four members of an Odia family were among 22 people on board a small plane that disappeared over Nepal’s mountains amid a thick cloud cover on Sunday shortly after taking off from the tourist town of Pokhara, officials said.

The plane is suspected to have crashed in a remote spot in the Dhaulagiri area, the newspaper My Republica said quoting Mustang district deputy superintendent of police Ram Kumar Dani, amid reports that local people had seen an aircraft on fire.

The four Indians have been identified as Ashok Tripathy, who worked for a software company in Bhubaneswar, his wife Baibhabi, son Dhanush and daughter Ritika. Baibhabi worked for a company in Mumbai. The family was holidaying in Nepal.

The Twin Otter 9N-AET plane, belonging to the private Nepali airline Tara Air, had taken off in the morning for a 20-minute flight from Pokhara, 125km west of Kathmandu, to Jomsom, a tourist and pilgrimage site 80km northwest of Pokhara. It lost contact with the control tower five minutes before it was due to land.

Apart from the four Indians, the plane had two German and 13 Nepali passengers besides a three-member Nepali crew, the airline spokesperson said.

The Indian embassy in Nepal tweeted that it was “in touch with” the four Indians’ family. “Our emergency hotline number: +977-9851107021.”

Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 said the missing De Havilland Canada DHC-6-300 Twin Otter aircraft made its first flight in April 1979.

Tara Air started business in 2009.

The aircraft lost contact with the tower when it was above Ghorepani, aviation sources said. An air traffic controller at Jomsom airport spoke of an unconfirmed report about a loud noise in Ghasa, Jomsom.

Cellphone clue

A Nepal army helicopter carrying 10 soldiers and two civil aviation employees had landed on a riverbank near the Narshang Monastery, the possible site of the crash, My Republica quoted Kathmandu airport general manager Prem Nath Thakur as saying.

Thakur said Nepal Telecom had tracked the cellphone of the pilot, Captain Prabhakar Ghimire, through the Global Positioning System network.

“The cell phone of Captain Ghimire has been ringing and Nepal army’s helicopter has landed in the possible accident area after tracking the captain’s phone from Nepal Telecom,” Thakur said.

The other crew members were co-pilot Utsav Pokhrel and airhostess Kismi Thapa, officials said.

State-owned Nepal Television said villagers had seen an aircraft on fire at the source of the Lyanku Khola River at the foot of the Manapathi mountain in a district bordering Tibet.

“Ground search teams are proceeding towards that direction,” the airline spokesperson told Reuters. “It could be a fire by villagers or by cowherds. It could be anything.”

Search hurdle

Myagdi chief district officer Chiranjibi Rana told The Kathmandu Post newspaper that bad weather had hampered search at the site where the plane was last spotted by local people.

He said eyewitnesses had reported seeing the plane make two circles at Khaibang and head to Kiti Danda near Lete Pass (2,500m).

“A police team has been mobilised at the site. The site is a 12-hour walk from Lete. There are no human settlements in the area where locals last spotted the plane,” he said.

“As soon as the weather improves, the helicopter will begin aerial operations.”

The weather office said there had been thick cloud cover in the Pokhara-Jomson area since morning.

Nepal, home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountains, has a record of air accidents. Its weather can change suddenly and airstrips are typically located in mountainous areas that are hard to reach.

In early 2018, a US-Bangla Airlines flight from Dhaka to Kathmandu crashed on landing and caught fire, killing 51 of the 71 people on board.

In 1992, all 167 people aboard a Pakistan International Airlines plane were killed when it ploughed into a hill while trying to land in Kathmandu.